The Buzz...About Books

Still Bleeding Blue

Toronto hockey fans -- this is for you.

If you're still reeling from the devastating loss that was Game 7 on Monday night, know that you're not alone. Many Leafs fans across the city are still in shock, and even the bandwagon fans knew a tragedy when they saw one. The sheer volume of jaws dropping when Boston made that final goal in overtime...I'd never seen so many hearts break in an instant.

So, here's a moment for our beloved Leafs - and even more - here's a moment for the die-hard fans that love them.

Check out some titles that look into the minds of sports fans, how sports became such a huge part of Canadian culture and more.

    

 

 

And, remember...there's always next year!
 

Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir by Amanda Knox

Waiting to be Heard: a Memoir by Amanda Knox promises to tell her side of a particularly brutal story.

Knox, an American student living in Italy, was sentenced to 26 years for the 2007 murder and sexual assualt of her British roomate, Meredith Kercher. Knox's boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito was also convicted for his role in this gruesome murder.

In 2011, the convictions were overturned on appeal and both were released.  In March 2013, these acquittals were reversed and a retrial ordered.

Sensational media coverage with reports of satanic rites, sex, drugs, police brutality, false allegations, conspiracies, and cover-ups makes it difficult to tell fact from fiction. 

Here is a timeline of the main events. 

One thing is clear: people just love to hate Amanda Knox. Social media and online communities are fixated on the 25-year old woman now living in Seattle. 

Her supporters claim she is a victim of a sexist and corrupt judicial system. Her haters (and there are many) claim she is simply a pretty little liar - a psychopath who might get away with murder.  

Here's some recent coverage of her book: Toronto Star, Globe, New Yorker, CBC, Telegraph, Guardian, and The New York Times.

Watch an excerpt from Knox's first interview after her release from prison with Diane Sawyer. Full interview (warning-some graphic content): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. 

Listen to her Canadian interview on the CBC. 

 

Meredith Kercher, Age 19 in England

 

The Kercher family responds to the release of Knox's book and her impending retrial. Meredith's father, John Kercher, is a journalist and has released a book in the UK about his daughter (to date, it's not available in Canada).

 Further reading available at the Toronto Public Library:

Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: Reading to Help Your Nothing Day

The Mary Tyler Moore Show almost didn't make it after all.  Jennifer Armstrong's Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted reveals that early audiences gave it a chilly reception. 36 years later, The Mary Tyler Moore Show is cited as setting the bar for television comedy and for women's roles on TV. Without Mary Richards, there would be no Liz Lemon. Throw your hat in the ring - reserve your copy today to get the scoop on the writers, the cast dynamics, Veal Prince Orloff and Chuckles the Clown. 

Armstrong speaks about her book. Read her interview. Advance reviews are glowing: Kirkus and Publisher's Weekly love it. Recall some fave characters here. According to the Huffington Post, the female cast members will reunite on an upcoming Hot in Cleveland episode - made bittersweet with Valerie Harper's recent announcement about her illness.

 

Further reading from MTM alumnae:

Oprah is a serious MTM fan. Watch this:

Mimzi, the MTM kitty......

Edgar Awards: 2013 Winners Announced

The Edgar Awards, named after Edgar Allan Poe, celebrate crime writing in a number of different categories.

Fiction

Best Novel

Live By Night by Dennis Lehane
• Audiobook
• eAudiobook
• eBook
• Large Print
• Talking Book (restricted to Print Disabled patrons)

Best First Novel

The Expats by Chris Pavone
• Audiobook
• eAudiobook
• eBook
• Large Print
• Talking Book (restricted to Print Disabled patrons)

Best Paperback Original

The Last Policeman by Ben E. Winters
• eBook

Mary Higgins Clark Award

The Other Woman by Hank Phillippi Ryan
• eAudiobook
• Large Print

Non-Fiction

Best Fact Crime

Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French
• eAudiobook
• Large Print

Best Critical/Biographical

The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics by James O'Brien

Related Posts:

• "The Edgar" Nominees: The Best in Mystery

The Publishing Triangle Awards

The Publishing Triangle is an association of lesbians and gay men in the publishing industry. Every year the organization presents awards in a variety of categories. 

Fiction Awards

The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Monstress: Stories by Lysley Tenorio
• eBook

The Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction
A Horse Named Sorrow by Trebor Healey

Nonfiction Awards

The Judy Kahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Are You My Mother?: a Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel

The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
Eminent Outlaws: the Gay Writers who Changed America by Christopher Bram

Poetry Awards

The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Song and Spectacle by Rachel Rose

The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry
Looking for the Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco

2013 Pulitzer Prize Winners

On April 15 winners of this year's Pulitzer Prize for Letters were announced in the following categories:

Biography or Autobiography

Winner:
The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss
• Audiobook
• eAudiobook
• eBook
• Talking Book (restricted to Print Disabled patrons)

 

Finalists:

The Patriarch: the Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw
• Audiobook
• eAudiobook
• Talking Book (restricted to Print Disabled patrons)

Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece by Michael Gorra

Fiction

Winner:
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
• eAudiobook
• eBook
• Large Print

 

 

Finalists:

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
• eAudiobook
• Large Print

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander
• Audiobook
• eAudiobook
• eBook
• Large Print
• Talking Book (restricted to Print Disabled patrons)

General Non-Fiction

Winner:
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King

 

 

 

Finalists:

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
• Audiobook
• eAudiobook
• eBook
• Large Print
• Talking Book (restricted to Print Disabled patrons)

The Forest Unseen: a Year's Watch in Nature by David George Haskell

History

Winner:
Embers of War: the Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall
• eBook

 

 

Finalists:

The Barbarous Years: the Peopling of British North America: the Conflict of Civilizations 1600-1975 by Bernard Bailyn
• eBook

Lincoln's Code: the Laws of War in American History by John Fabian Witt

Poetry

Winner:
Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds

 

 

 

 

Finalists:

The Abundance of Nothing by Bruce Weigl

Collected Poems by Jack Gilbert

The Sweet Smell of...Sense of Smell Day

Sense of Smell Day was created in 1994 by the Sense of Smell Institute, the research and educational division of The Fragrance Foundation. The Fragrance Foundation is the non-profit, educational arm of the global fragrance industry.

Each of these books provides a different perspective on scent:

The Perfect Scent: a Year Inside the Perfume Industry in New York and Paris by Chandler Burr
Burr describes the creation of two perfumes: Hermès' Un Jardin sur le Nil in Paris and Coty's Lovely in New York.

Scent of the Missing: Love and Partnership with a Search-and-Rescue Dog by Susannah Charleson
• Large Print
Pilot Charleson describes her efforts to train Puzzle, a search-and-rescue dog.

The Scent Trail: an Olfactory Odyssey by Celia Lyttelton
After a signature scent is created for her, Lyttelton sets out on a quest to discover the origin of its ingredients.

Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way by Molly Birnbaum
Her dreams of becoming a chef are destroyed when she loses her sense of smell so Birnbaum focuses her energy on learning about the process and science of smell.

What the Nose Knows: the Science of Scent in Everyday Life by Avery Gilbert
Psychologist and olfactory researcher Gilbert examines the science and culture of smell.

Waiting for Dan Brown's next book? Try other books set in or about Florence.

Inferno, the next thriller in Dan Brown's series about Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is scheduled to be published in mid-May.   We have many copies on order, so place your hold now!  The book is available in audiobook, Large Print, eAudiobook and Talking Book (restricted to Print Disabled patrons) formats as well.

In this new book, Robert Langdon finds himself in the beautiful city of Florence, Italy and involved in another adventure. This time it involves the Inferno, the first book of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, where Dante and his guide Virgil travel through the layers of Hell.  If this story is similar to the previous books in the series, Langdon will face dangerous adversaries and will have to solve mysteries and riddles to save the world - once again.

Alternatively, if you've recently been to (or are planning to attend) the current exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Revealing the Early Renaissance: Stories and Secrets in Florentine Art, this too may have sparked an interest to learn more about Renaissance Florence.  If that is the case, you may want to attend the upcoming program Florentine Altarpieces in the Early Renaissance, which is being held on May 7th at North York Central Library.

So,  whether you are eagerly awaiting Dan Brown's next thriller, or looking forward to visiting the AGO exhibit (or perhaps both), have a look at this list of books about Florence and/or Dante:

Non-Fiction

The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
In this classic poem, as Dante travels through Hell with his guide Virgil, he describes an underworld of nine concentric circles of increasingly agonising torture, where he encounters doomed souls including the pagan Aeneas, the liar Odysseus, the suicide Cleopatra, and his own political enemies.  His journey continues in the next two volumes of the poem, Purgatorio and Paradiso.

April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici by Laura Martines
In 1478, assassins attacked the brothers Lorenzo and Giuliano de Medici while they attended mass in Florence's Cathedral.  Giuliano was killed.  This is the story of the conspiracy behind the assassination and the resulting reprisals by Lorenzo de Medici.

Brunelleschi’s Dome: The Story of the Great Cathedral in Florence by Ross King.
When it was completed, the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence was hailed as one of the wonders of the world  and it still retains a rare power to astonish six centuries later.  This is the story of the building of the dome, which was the greatest architectural puzzle of its age.  To this day, it remains the largest masonry dome ever constructed. Also available in Large Print.

Dante in Love: The World’s Greatest Poem and How It Made History by Harriet Rubin.
 Rubin reconstructs Dante's love for Beatrice and his years of travel and exile, while also examining the impact that contemporary events had on his writing of the Divine Comedy. 

Medici money : banking, metaphysics, and art in fifteenth-century Florence by Tim Parks.
While the Medici family were late entrants into the world of banking, they used their resources to rise to the height of political power in fifteenth-century republican Florence and to extend patronage not only to political supporters but also to artists and scholars.

 

Fiction

The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl
In 1865 Boston, as the Dante Club, which includes poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, prepares to release the first translation of Dante's "The Divine Comedy", they are threatened by a series of murders that re-create episodes from "Inferno". Also available in audiobook.

I, Mona Lisa by Jeanne Kalogridis.
When Madonna Lisa’s love, Giuliano de Medici, meets a tragic end, Lisa must then gather all her courage and cunning to untangle a sinister web of illicit love, treachery, and dangerous secrets that threatens her life.  

The Mosaic Crimes by Guilio Leoni, translated from Italian by Anne Milano Appel.
In the aftermath of an artist's murder in 1300 Florence, Dante Alighieri undertakes the investigation, during which he wonders about an assembly of seven master scholars and the secret behind the victim's mosaic.

The Passion of Artemisia by Susan Vreeland.
After Artemisia Gentileschi finds herself humiliated in the papal court, her new husband takes her to Florence, where her talent for painting blossoms and she begins a lifelong search to reconcile painting and motherhood, passion and genius. Also available in audiobook.

Midnight Angels by Lorenzo Carcaterra.
While exploring Florence, art students Kate Westcott and Marco Scudarti uncover a secret chamber which holds lost scuptures by Michelangelo. When word of the discovery gets out, Kate and Marco are pursued by criminals and fall under suspicion from the elite Rome Art Squad. Kate and Marco race to preserve and protect not only Michelangelo’s work but also their lives. A thrilling page-turner.

This Earth Day, why not adopt a four-pronged approach to saving the planet?

For more than 40 years, Earth Day, celebrated on April 22, has been inspiring people to protect the environment. Quickly -- off the top of your head, what is the single most important thing you can do to lessen your impact on the earth? Recycle your newspapers? Drive a hybrid car or take public transit? All these actions really do help but nothing helps more than reducing or eliminating your consumption of meat (having fewer children helps too but this isn’t something you can easily employ retroactively!).

Numerous scientific investigations including a recent United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) study advocate eating less meat in order to avoid further environmental damage, because current farming practices are destroying the natural world.  Another UN study, Livestock’s Long Shadow, reports that the livestock sector is one of the top contributors to the most serious environmental damage, both locally and globally.

Animal farming is related to land degradation, climate change, air and water pollution, water shortages and loss of biodiversity. Pollution from fertilizers threatens human health and the environment by causing toxic algal blooms –- and 80 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorus in fertilizers is consumed indirectly by livestock. Did you know it takes 420 gallons of water to produce one pound of grain-fed chicken?  And the amount of manure produced by factory farms is three times greater than the amount produced by humans? According to the United Nations, “A substantial reduction of impacts [from agriculture] would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change away from animal products.”

Per-capita meat consumption has more than doubled in the past 50 years and global population continues to increase. The overall demand for meat has increased five-fold, putting increasing pressure on the availability of water, land, feed, fertilizer, fuel and waste disposal capacity. The Worldwatch Institute posits that meat consumption is a driving force behind deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities and the spread of disease. Switching to a vegan diet can cut 90 percent of the total emissions your eating habits contribute to global warming, while, according to data from Carnegie Mellon University, switching to all-local foods will only reduce emissions by four percent! Read more in Worldwatch Institute’ s ejournal available free with your library card.

Reducing your meat consumption is soooo easy now –- start with Forks Over Knives (also available in DVD and ebook) and the Forks Over Knives cookbook. A vegetarian diet will also help you lose weight, lower your cholesterol and prevent (or even reverse) chronic conditions such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes and help you look hot. The right food not only helps the planet but is your best medicine.

 

       

Avoiding meat also means avoiding the consumption of fecal material as almost 90 percent of all store-bought meat shows contact with Enterococcus faecium –- a bacteria in fecal matter. As strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria become more commonplace because of their use in factory farming, the less we are able to use the drugs to treat human disease.
 

Need some support? Join Toronto Vegetarian Association for nutritional information, podcasts, menu ideas and restaurant advice; www.GreenYourDiet.org is another great resource. Check out all the amazing veg blogs out there and sign up to receive regular emails so you always have new recipe ideas for inspiration. Take part in rabble.ca’s Vegan Challenge because a vegan diet has even less of an environmental impact (a 2009 study by the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency reported that transitioning to a vegan diet would mitigate climate change costs by around 80 percent whereas just eliminating meat reduces costs by around 70 percent). To quote one rabble blogger, “It sounds overwhelming. It sounds impossible. But so does ending gender-based violence or eliminating institutional racism... We can tackle the Vegan Challenge the same way we do global injustice, by starting with small daily actions.”

Food choices matters. Every time we sit down to eat, each of us can help create a greener, kinder and healthier world simply by leaving animals off our plates.

A Quick Read With Charlie D

Looking for a fast, enjoyable read? Don't have time for the new trend of 800 page books? The Rapid Reads series might just be what you are looking for. These books are usually no longer than 100 pages. Stories include anything from mysteries, gang life to romance. If you prefer to read non-fiction, there are also books on a variety of subjects including the World Wars, finance and global warming.

Through this series, I discovered Gail Bowen's interesting character, Charlie D, who hosts a late-night radio program. His listeners are very involved in the call-in portion of the show and his regular callers tend to be outcasts, who feel deeply connected to Charlie. But Charlie also hears from listeners whose personal relationships with him go too far and can result in murder.

   

Love You to Death
Charlie discovers that his callers are being killed on by one. The police suspect that one of Charlie's fans is obsessed and are now depending on Charlie to bring the killer out of hiding before another murder occurs. Also available in eBook.

One Fine Day You're Gonna Die
An expert on death and dying is a guest on Charlie D's radio show. Things take a very dark turn when a caller threatens to kill himself, as well as the daughter of Charlie's guest. Also available in eBook.

The Shadow Killer
It's Father's Day and Charlie D is wrestling with memories of his estranged father, when a young caller shares his plan to murder his own father and the rest of his family. Can Charlie find the location of the caller? Time is running out, and surprisingly Charlie's father may be able to help.

To learn more about Rapid Reads visit their website.