Wallkill Public Library
Fall fiction 2012 preview

Fall isn't quite in the air, yet, but the anticipation is there 
(especially on the part of some parents),and whether you're looking forward to it, dreading it, or could care less either way, you've got a few things to look forward to - not the least among them being a whole new season of bestsellers!

 There is no shortage of websites readers can delve into when in the mood for seasonal previews. From old reliables like Amazon.comGoodreads, and the Huffington Post, to the possibly less visited (but just as valuable!) sites like Bookreporter and Kirkus Reviews, we've mined a few choice picks for the discriminating reader. Keep an eye peeled for the following:

 

 The Middlesteins, by Jami Attenberg: For more than 30 years, Edie and Richard Middlestein shared a solid family life together in the suburbs of Chicago. But now things are splintering apart, for one reason, it seems: Edie's enormous girth. She's obsessed with food - thinking about it, eating it - and if she doesn't stop, she won't have much longer to live. When Richard abandons his wife, it is up to the next generation to take control.

 

Sweet Tooth, by Ian McEwan - Cambridge student Serena Frome's beauty and intelligence make her the ideal recruit for MI5. The year is 1972. The Cold War is far from over. England's legendary intelligence agency is determined to manipulate the cultural conversation by funding writers whose politics align with those of the government. The operation is code named "Sweet Tooth."
Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, is the perfect candidate to infiltrate the literary circle of a promising young writer named Tom Haley. At first, she loves his stories. Then she begins to love the man. How long can she conceal her undercover life?

 

The Twelve, by Justin Cronin - In book two of The Passage trilogy, it's the present day, and as the man-made apocalypse unfolds, three strangers navigate the chaos. Lila, a doctor and an expectant mother, is so shattered by the spread of violence and infection that she continues to plan for her child's arrival even as society dissolves around her. Kittridge, known to the world as "Last Stand in Denver," has been forced to flee his stronghold and is now on the road, dodging the infected, armed but alone and well aware that a tank of gas will get him only so far. April is a teenager fighting to guide her little brother safely through a landscape of death and ruin. These three will learn that they have not been fully abandoned - and that in connection lies hope, even on the darkest of nights.
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Live by Night, by Dennis Lehane - Boston, 1926. Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city's most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw.

But life on the dark side carries a heavy price. Beyond money and power, even the threat of prison, one fate seems most likely for men like Joe: an early death.

 

NW by Zadie Smith - This is the story of a city.
The northwest corner of a city. Here you'll find guests and hosts, those with power and those without it, people who live somewhere special and others who live nowhere at all. And many people in between.
Every city is like this. Cheek-by-jowl living. Separate worlds.
And then there are the visitations: the rare times a stranger crosses a threshold without permission or warning, causing a disruption in the whole system. Like the April afternoon a woman came to Leah Hanwell's door, seeking help, disturbing the peace, forcing Leah out of her isolation... 

 

  The Casual Vacancy, by J.K. Rowling - When Barry Fairbrother dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty fa�ade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils.... Pagford is not what it first seems. And the empty seat left by Barry on the town's council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations?  

 

Telegraph Avenue, by Michael Chabon - As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there - longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart-half tavern, half temple-stands Brokeland.

When ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complication to the couples' already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffe's life.

 

 Beautiful Lies, by Clare Clark - London 1887. For Maribel Campbell Lowe, the beautiful bohemian wife of a maverick politician, it is the year to make something of herself. A self-proclaimed Chilean heiress educated in Paris, she is torn between poetry and the new art of photography. But it is soon plain that Maribel's choices are not so simple. As her husband's career hangs by a thread, her real past, and the family she abandoned, come back to haunt them both.

 

  In Sunlight and in Shadow, by Mark Helprin - It's 1946, and Postwar New York glows with energy. Harry Copeland, an elite paratrooper who fought behind enemy lines in Europe, has returned home to run the family business. Yet his life is upended by a single encounter with the young singer and heiress Catherine Thomas Hale, as they each fall for the other in an instant.
 Catherine's choice of Harry over her longtime fianc� endangers Harry's livelihood and eventually threatens his life. In the end, it is Harry's extraordinary wartime experience that gives him the character and means to fight for Catherine, and risk everything.

 

Between Two Fires, by Christopher Buehlman - The year is 1348. Thomas, a disgraced knight, has found a young girl alone in a dead Norman village. An orphan of the Black Death, and an almost unnerving picture of innocence, she tells Thomas that the plague is only part of a larger cataclysm - that the fallen angels under Lucifer are rising in a second war on heaven, and that the world of men has fallen behind the lines of conflict.

 By no means exhaustive, this is but a sampling of cooler weather fiction to come. Stay tuned next week for a list of upcoming nonfiction blockbusters.

 

Coming up at the Wallkill Public Library 
  Story Time registration will begin Aug. 30, with Story Time kicking off Sept. 11. This season Book Buddies will be offered at 10:30 a.m. Tuesdays and 1 p.m. Wednesdays: Mommy and Me will take place at 10 a.m. Wednesdays: and Toddler Story Time will be offered at 11 a.m. Wednesdays. 
Keep an eye out later in September for The Studio, a place for middle school students to come and hang out, do homework, listen to music, or just reconnect with their friends. Once a month a special activity will also be offered during The Studio's 2-3:30 p.m. Thursday time slot - cooking, art, pottery, and more will be among the monthly activities.

Coming up this week at the library:

  Tuesday - Book Talk will feature Brian Selznick's Wonderstruck at 6:30 p.m.
Wednesday - Lego Building will be available at 1:30 p.m. A Drop-In Craft will be offered at 2:30 p.m.
Thursday: The Knit and Crochet Club meets at 6:30 p.m. The Fiction Club also meets at 6:30 p.m. (hopefully outside). This month's selection is Nevada Barr's 13 1/2.

In September:
The Third Annual Harvest Faire will take place from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 29! Business owners as well as private vendors will be on hand to sell their merchandise on the front lawn of the library. A bouncy house will be set up, and entertainment will be scheduled throughout the day. Food, tricky tray baskets, and a host of other attractions are planned, as well.
This is the perfect arena to sell craft, garage sale items, and more  - if you're interested in being a vendor, contact Donna at [email protected] or 895-3531. 
And take a look at the Ulster County Tourism  site for this and other great local festival, event, and entertainment listings! 
Trustee positions coming up for vote  
   The election for the library's four open Board of Trustee seats will be held Sept. 25. 
Candidates' petitions, signed by 50 qualified  voters ( those who live in the Town of Shawangunk, within the Wallkill School District)  must be handed in by Sept. 12 in order to qualify to run for the available positions.
If you have questions regarding your status as a voter, or need to register as one, you can visit the Ulster County Board of Elections  or call them at 334-5470. Remember, if you're not registered, you need to do so and mail or deliver your form to the Board of Elections 25 days before the election in which you want to participate!
This year's presidential election is Tuesday, Nov. 6.
Why Wiki when you can rely on Wallkill?

  September's coming, and a library card is an essential school supply for many reasons.

Sure, there are the obvious ones - where else can you pick up just about any book/DVD/CD/periodical of your choosing for free?

Some of the lesser known benefits of being a card-carrier are the websites of the RCLS libraries - all of which offer a plethora of resources for students and others. Don't quote inaccurate information from one of the droves of unreliable web resources out there (some of which are pretty clever at camouflaging themselves as dependable) - visit Wallkill Public Library's Online Research Tools section of our website, or any of the informative research areas available on the websites of other RCLS libraries.

The sun will come out Oct. 13 (for some)
   Interested in a Broadway excursion to see Annie?
A bus will leave the library at 9 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 13, for a 2 p.m. matinee of the Broadway musical. Tickets are $59 for rear mezzanine seats, in addition to the $25 bus fare. Fifteen tickets are already reserved - those who want to attend must make their payments by Sept. 5!
If you're interested in reserving a seat, call Adrienne at 895-8712, or email her at [email protected]
Can you find a dream job online? Indeed. 

  With more than 70 million unique visitors and 1.5 billion job searches per month, Indeed touts itself as the top job site worldwide. Here job hunters can troll job listings by the millions, in all fields, collected from both company websites and job boards.

If such abundance intimidates you, you can glean tips on narrowing or broadening your search on the free site. For those who don't have the time or desire to search the site on a daily basis, job alerts can be set up to notify you when a listing of interest pops up. Indeed is one of many job-hunting sites available on the web, but features such as these make checking it out regularly worth adding to your to-do list if you're in the market for a new career.

Book prescribes ways to stop bullying 
 
Bullied: What Every Parent, Teacher, and Kid Needs to Know About Ending the Cycle of Fear, by Carrie Goldman
 

Carrie Goldman became an unexpected voice for the antibullying movement after her blog post about her daughter Katie's bullying experience went viral and an online community of support generated international attention. In Bullied, Goldman brings together the expertise of leading authorities with the candid accounts of families dealing firsthand with peer victimization to present proven strategies and concrete tools for teaching children how to speak up and carry themselves with confidence; call each other out on cruelty; resolve conflict; cope with teasing, taunting, physical abuse, and cyberbullying; and be smart consumers of technology and media. As a mother, she calls on us all - families, schools, communities, retailers, celebrities, and media - to fiercely examine our own stereotypes and embrace our joint responsibility for creating a culture of acceptance and respect.

For parents, educators, and anyone still wrestling with past experiences of victimization and fear, Bullied is an eye-opening, prescriptive, and ultimately uplifting guide to raising diverse, empathetic, tolerant kids in a caring and safe world.

At least 25 percent of kids have been bullied online. One in five teens has been bullied at school. More than half of bullying behaviors will stop in less than ten seconds when another student intervenes.

 
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