E-books: How do they work?

Things have slowed down a lot here at the Library. The sheet where we keep our statistics is much whiter than it used to be, and the building has quieted down considerably. It's kind of nice, but a little dull between projects.

To enliven things a little bit, I read through The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I guess you could call this a young-adult book, which is okay with me, because some of the most interesting novels being written these days are being written for the 11-17 age group (with certain notable exceptions, such as a certain vampire-themed series I won't name here).

I briefly mentioned The Hunger Games in a previous post as a recommendation, but didn't think anything of it beyond a decent premise. Boy, how wrong I was.

It's a terrific book! You've got this young woman, Katniss, who lives in the poorest of 12 districts centered on the Capitol. Her district is the furthest out and is mostly focused on coal mining; starvation is rampant, while the few merchants and business owners live fairly comfortably. There's a healthy black market, to which the Capitol's enforcers turn a blind eye, and Katniss ekes out a basic living for her mother (who hasn't been the same since her husband died) and her younger sister by hunting in a forbidden section of the woods with a boy she's known her entire life. It's not a very good life by the most generous of definitions, but she does all right with what she has. She's a survivor.

In Katniss's country (which stretches from the Capitol, located in present-day Denver, to the Appalachians, where Katniss lives), a yearly event involves a lottery drawing in which teenagers are required to participate. This lottery results in one boy and one girl from each district being sent to the Capitol, where they must participate in the eponymous Hunger Games.

However, something nasty happens; this year just so happens to be the first year Katniss's younger sister, Prim, becomes eligible for the drawing. Because of the way the lottery is set up, the odds of a first-year candidate's name coming up are astronomically low, but Prim is selected. Katniss freaks out and volunteers to go in her little sister's place, which is allowable by an old and little-used rule.

In general, the book between this point and the actual Games itself is by far the most interesting part. That's not to say it's the only interesting part -- all of it is good -- but it's certainly thought-provoking. After volunteering, Katniss is immediately whisked off to the Capitol, where she has her very first encounter with an abundance of food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, and money. Meals are intricately detailed, surroundings richly described, clothing exulted in. It's an interesting perspective, because although, of course, this is a different culture than ours, there are enough similarities that lead you to wonder what a diamond miner from the darkest regions of the Congo would think if he saw New York, courtesy of Donald Trump.

Of course, I forgot to mention the boy sent to the Capitol along with Katniss; the son of the local baker, he lives more comfortably than most in their district. The two of them have history -- he did her a significant kindness in one of the darkest periods of a an already-dark life -- but, in the poisonous atmosphere of the Games and the industry surrounding it, she questions his motivations and embarks on a little adventure in paranoia culminating in the Games.

The Games are set up in a very interesting way. A large area of land -- whether woods, desert (unpopular because the competitors die too quickly), mountains, whatever -- is sectioned off, wired with cameras and microphones, and booby-trapped. A cornucopia is put in the middle of the initial staging area, full of important supplies, which the competitors have to scramble for when the starting gun goes off. Of course, a good number of players are killed in the initial scramble, and the rest disperse to ally with one another and strategize their way through the competition. The whole point is to have only one person left alive.

It sounds pretty dark, and it is -- the wealthiest districts train all of their kids for participation in the Hunger Games, while the poorest districts see it as a possible way out of crushing poverty for the survivor. The odds are against the poorer players, though; a lifetime without proper nutrition and medical care works against them. District 12, Katniss's district, though poor, is the sole exception; they see it in its true light as a way of subjugating the population and emphasizing the power of the government centered on the Capitol. Katniss manages to outlive all but a few of the players, but this means she has to fight for her life against the most efficient killers in the Capitol.

I devoted a lot of space in this post to The Hunger Games because it's probably one of the best pure-fiction books I've read so far this year, and that is saying a lot. Recommended!

Now, moving on ...

I said last week that I'd talk a little bit about e-books today. Some folks do get a little confused about how they really work, mostly because, I think, they have an image in their mind of a PDF they can download, save to their computer, cell phone, or e-reader, and carry around with them. At the very least, they can print it out, right?

Not ... really. This would be the point where I embark on a rant about ridiculous proprietary software restrictions and digital rights management and so on and so forth. There's some debate happening right now on the "right" way to distribute published texts electronically for profit, and we won't go into that today (unfortunate, because I had an awesome metaphor all ready to go, involving Lunchables!).

Basically, an e-book is an electronic book; it's generally a text that's been scanned or published digitally in some form. E-books are distributed in a few different ways; some are totally free to read and play around with (like most of Cory Doctorow's work, including Makers and Little Brother, everything in Project Gutenberg, and many things in Google Books), while others require special software and carry restrictions depending on the publisher and distributors.

In the case of the Gallaudet University Library, the e-books available are of the latter kind. Proprietary formats and the protection of the rights of the people producing and distributing the work is more or less typical of academic publishing; if you've ever had to buy textbooks for a class, you know how expensive they can be. This is because of the various contracts at play here; usually, the author has some rights, the university where the author works has some rights, and the publisher has some rights, and they all need to make some money. Fortunately, if you're a Gallaudet student or faculty or staff member, you have free access through the Gallaudet University Library!

Most of the e-books you'll find in our catalog will open inside the distributor's e-reading software; it's usually eBrary, one of our biggest providers. Occasionally, you'll come across a book with both a print copy in our collection and an electronic copy online, which is nice if you're not the only one researching your topic; classmates and other researchers can get access to the same book electronically without competing with one another for a single print resource.

However, we do sometimes have restrictions on use, which are outlined in the e-book's record in ALADIN Discovery. You'll see a note in the Item availability area of a record that'll tell you if you can only view the e-book for two hours at a time, or if only one person can view it at a time. For example, take a look at the record for Everything you need to know about deafness; you'll see under Location in "Item availability" the following:

GA: UNIV Electronic Book--Two Hour Limit

It's fairly self-explanatory. However, not a lot of our e-books have 2-hour limits or viewing restrictions; the vast majority of our e-book holdings are available through eBrary, and they generally don't restrict viewing of the material. They do, however, limit the ability to print; I've seen e-books that only allow you to print up to 9 pages at a time, while others allow 60 or 100. Again, this is mostly because of licensing and copyright. Still, we do our best to purchase e-books from less-restrictive distributors like eBrary -- that's why so many of our electronic holdings are from them.

Now, access. People usually have a problem with this, because the link to actually get into the book isn't surrounded by flashing lights; it's just one link among quite a few in your average record. However, each record usually has at least two links you can use; one in the URL field near the top of the record and one in "Item availability" near the bottom in the Linked resources field (take a look at the above record for Everything you need to know about deafness to see what I mean). For the most part, if you're on campus, clicking on either link will take you straight to the e-book. If you're off-campus, you'll need to log in in the same way as any of our other electronic resources; this means that if you're not a Gallaudet-affiliated individual with a Gallaudet ID number or Library bar code number, you won't be able to get in.

Once you're in ... well, I will be the first to admit that the e-reader interface is usually less than intuitive. Some people like it, and some people don't; I know faculty who have their own (free) accounts with eBrary, which allows them to save bookmarks and highlighted passages in our e-books to their account, but this feature isn't used very much by students. Still, accounts are free and available to anyone who needs this kind of functionality.

So why do we have e-books at all? First, because they do represent a significant pool of available knowledge that can only benefit our collection. There are plenty of fantastic books in there, especially if you're exploring more esoteric subjects like, for example, proteomics (the large-scale study of proteins, their structures, and their functions). We do have a few print books on the subject, but the majority of our holdings in the field are e-books. Depending on the circumstance, this can mean that access to e-books is superior to access to scholarly articles; most articles are very narrowly focused on specific aspects of a particular field and the general overviews usually contained therein are too brief to offer a useful understanding of the field at large.

Second, they're fairly cheap; we can get a big block of thousands of books at a significantly lower cost than print. Actually publishing books on paper isn't getting any cheaper, while distributing them electronically is. This is a fact of our lives today, and we do benefit from it.

Third, e-books are a terrific way to stay current in your field of research. Print books can sometimes be outdated by the day we get them, two weeks after we ordered them -- another mixed blessing of our age. This way, eBrary or our other e-book providers can swap out outdated books for newer editions almost instantly, thereby ensuring access to up-to-date and in-depth information.

And fourth, they are, on the whole, easier to work with than printed text in some ways. For one, they're searchable; it's much easier to zero in on the exact chapter or passage that you want without having to search through the entire book. E-books can save a lot of time and headaches.

In general, e-books are great resources to have for research purposes. Granted, they're not perfect -- the air is still being massaged out of the pipes of this new mode of access to information -- but their benefits outweigh their inconveniences.

Next week, a more in-depth look at some examples of our e-books. We've got some fun ones!

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Question of the Week
I noticed that the way you capitalize book titles is pretty weird. I was always taught that you capitalize every word except prepositions, articles, and conjunctions, but you usually only capitalize the first word and proper nouns -- except for the books you review every week. What's up with that?
What's up with that? Well, I'm weird in general. If that answer isn't enough to satisfy you, try this: I'm an APA guy.

What? That's not good enough? Well ... okay. See, for books I read for pleasure, I usually capitalize them the way I was taught in my English classes growing up, basically the same way you were. However, for academic titles, I've fallen into the habit of using the APA citation style's capitalization rules for book and article titles in references, which usually mandates that you capitalize only the first word, any proper nouns, and the first word in a subtitle. Everything else is in lower case. Journal titles, like the ones I listed in my previous post, have every major word capitalized, also according to APA.

What can I say? Academic indoctrination can be very effective, especially when you've been involved with one university or another for close to a decade. But why the difference between books I read for pleasure and scholarly texts? Call it an idiosyncrasy. Diff'rent strokes ...

exploring our e-journals

I guess this blog is becoming an amalgam of weather reports, book reviews, library information, and questions. The truth is, I've noticed that many of this blog's readers originate from outside the Washington metropolitan area, some as far-flung as the other side of the world -- hi, guys -- and noting the weather of the week has become a habit. Gallaudet is, after all, an institution in our nation's capital, and has been for almost 150 years, so we have strong ties to our place.

So, the report: finally clear and sunny today after a long, cold, rainy week. When I was riding to work the other day, another Gallaudet staff member complained that she was still wearing winter clothes -- and it's the middle of May! The weather this year has been odd, and I am fervently praying that this means a mild summer, not the drippingly humid underworld of last year. We'll see.

This week, I took one of my own recommendations (found in this post, back in March) and read Heresy: A Thriller by S.J. Parrish. Yes, I admit it; the New Book Cart Day recommendations don't necessarily mean I've read the book itself. I do read their book reviews, though, and usually go for some of the most interesting finds, and when I do get around to reading them, I'm invariably proven correct.

That was the case for Heresy. It's every bit as interesting as its basic premise sounds; although it doesn't actually focus on the debate between the main character, Giordano Bruno, and the rector of Oxford, Underhill, about cosmology (an actual historical event), it does focus on the murders (which are fictional), creating a case that's both spooky and utterly ordinary for Elizabethan England. Most of the murders are locked-room mysteries; speculation is rampant about the supernatural nature of the killer. Bruno has to cut through all of this twaddle and ferret out the real murderer, who turns out to be wrapped up in a Papist conspiracy in a Britain ruled by an Anglican monarch and where Catholicism is severely -- and publicly -- punished.

A major part of Heresy's appeal is the believability of the environment that Parrish creates; you really feel like you're there in 16th-Century Oxford. It rains all the time, there's mud everywhere, and Catte Street is a major destination of the Oxford dons (for this to make sense, consider the word "cathouse"). A bunch of foreign aristocrats are running around and Philip Sidney, a well-known author, poet, and diplomat, groans at the idea of entertaining them. In the meantime, Bruno displays the intelligence, wit, and cutting sarcasm for which the actual historical figure is especially noted, befriending the lower class instead of currying favors with his noble patrons. This helps him win out in the end and save a few lives.

In general, it's crazy gripping; I finished it in a couple of days because the suspense kept building up in classic detective-novel fashion. It also introduces you to the ideas that were extant at the time, like Aristotelian notions about the structure of the heavens, the class system, and life at one of the West's oldest universities. For more information about the real Giordano Bruno, Wikipedia's a good place to start. Fascinating guy!

So it's summertime now. This means that there isn't a whole lot of new Library stuff I can report on at the moment; we have several major projects (or at least I do) in the works, but they don't bear a lot of public scrutiny until they're done. I'll report on those later on in the summer, as we get closer to the fall.

In the meantime, from this point on, at least until early-to-middle August, you can expect some more posts that explore our holdings. Instead of expounding at great length on how to perform searches or locate various items in the stacks, those posts will be general overviews of what those items are: What do we have? Why do we have them? What are they about? Why are they interesting? For questions on how to find them, refer to the following posts:

• How to find books, films, and other items in the catalog
• How to find electronic journals
• How to get into e-Journals, databases, and other ALADIN functions from off-campus
  

All three of the above posts are enumerated; they're all parts of two or three different series I've done on related topics, so if the above doesn't quite work for you, find the previous or next parts. Those will almost certainly have what you need. If all else fails, ask a librarian, whether in person or through the information on our contact page.

So this week, I'll take a look at some of our more interesting (and obscure) electronic journals. They're interesting for reasons beyond simple research; not only do they represent the breadth of the research available to folks who work or go to school at Gallaudet, but they also represent its depth. Just bear in mind that many of them are accessible as part of an overall package we subscribe to, so it's not as though we're spending money specifically on topics that don't always come up in the average discussion -- they're sort of the fringe benefits, and what benefits they are!

Here goes:

Nineteenth-Century Literature (ProQuest)
Almost immediately contradicting what I said in the previous paragraph, this is a resource that's tremendously useful for most of the students in our English classes; in fact, last year, the English department's Capstone presentations revolved around crime in Victorian literature, which dovetails neatly with this journal. It covers everything, American and British literature, as well as the literary culture emerging in India under the Raj. You get analyses of Emily Dickinson compared to contemporary writers, Victorian-era vampire literature quite aside from Bram Stoker's Dracula, and studies about modern-day argument as a rhetorical strategy based on Parliamentary proceedings of the 19th Century. It's good reading and very useful research.

Renaissance Quarterly (Ebscohost)
Don't worry; I'll move on from the literary and artistic stuff soon enough. It just happens to be my specialty, so this is the kind of thing that catches my eye. Anyway, RQ goes even further back than Nineteenth-Century Literature and is more multidisciplinary; one article published this year examines Albertus Magnus, a 13th-Century monk who was the subject of attempted canonization as a saint three centuries later; one significant obstacle preventing this was the fact that he was a well-known magician. Not the Siegfried & Roy kind of magician; I'm talking full-on Merlin's-beard, Harry-Potter stuff.

Philosophy of Science (Ebscohost)
I like the title, but I'm not sure about the stuff it has in it. What is 'multiple realization,' why does it matter, and how come people are arguing about it? Heck, it's just fun to read stuff that you're pretty sure is English but which makes no sense. If, however, you're genuinely interested in the systematic exploration of the epistemological processes behind scientific discovery, this might be the journal for you. Incidentally, multiple realization, based on my reading of a random article, appears to be the various applications of a basic kind of science -- kind of like astrophysics, nuclear physics and orbital mechanics, which are different ways in which the underlying discipline of applying physical laws is realized. One cool example I found: it's like two different kinds of corkscrews. They both get the cork out of the bottle, but do it in two different ways.

Journal of American Folklore (Project MUSE)
Interesting title to begin with, fascinating subject matter. For example, when your friend tells a joke at a dinner party, you may have noticed that some people think it's hilarious, while others don't think it's funny at all. Why is that? Apparently, "unlaughter" serves as a means of delineating boundaries between social groups; people who identify with one group may find a specific joke funny, while those who identify with a different group find nothing funny about it. The 2006 fracas over the Prophet Muhammad cartoons in Denmark, albeit extreme, serves as a good example of this. Apparently, this is significant research, because folklorists and those who study humor have focused mostly on the guy telling the joke, not the people who have to listen to it.

Religion and American Culture (ProQuest)
It sort of goes without saying that religion plays a large part in our culture -- especially in politics -- these days, but was it always that way? Well, yes; we can trace the history of the current wave of colonization of the New World directly to a group of religious refugees. Things aren't quite so simple, though; the modern-day evangelical movement notwithstanding, there have been other groups in the United States whose spiritual beliefs have shaped our history, such as a group of Japanese Buddhists who engendered the San Francisco poetry renaissance in the 1950s and 1960s, which led to the hippie movement, which ... well, you get the idea.

Supreme Court Review (LexisNexis)
The Supreme Court Review is a collection of summaries of Supreme Court judgments, released annually, that critically analyzes the decisions made by the Supreme Court each year, places them in historical, social, and political contexts, and offers a useful primer on the decisions which are made on the behalf of both the people and the government. The analyses in the Review are written by historians, political scientists, law professors, judges, economists, and policy planners. The annual summaries are fascinating to read; you really get an idea of how the Court works, the personalities of the justices, and the impacts their decisions can have.

Journal of Aesthetic Education (Project MUSE)
Now there's an esoteric name. "Aesthetic education" refers mostly to the fine arts, as well as theater; you see articles about art and porn, conceptual models of stagecraft, and the pedagogy of Rembrandt. Highly useful for academic work in fairly rarefied disciplines or upper-level undergraduate or graduate work in theater or art history; engrossing if you're just a museum and theater buff like me.

Journal of Nietzsche Studies (Project MUSE)
Yup, Nietzsche (of "God is dead" fame) gets his very own journal. One article I came across grabbed my attention right way: Francis Fukuyama, a writer who said that we reached "the end of history" in 1989 with the failure of the Soviet Union, is compared with Nietzsche in terms of their social philosophies. Nietzsche has typically been associated with the American left because of his refusal to subscribe to moral absolutism; morality, he says, is a human projection on nature. However, the right has appropriated him because of his support for traditional institutions as being essential to a functioning society. However, Nietzsche implied that the ultimate effect of modernity is the death of thymos, or human spiritedness -- which is why he's usually associated with nihilists, those depressing people who wear black and look anemic all the time. Fukuyama argues that this is not necessarily true, which places him in opposition to his own political mainstream.

Okay, I admit this is probably not very interesting to you. But I studied Fukuyama in my undergraduate years and had plenty of friends who considered themselves Nietzschean at the time, so it's a long-standing interest for me.

Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society (Ebscohost)
Judaism is one of the world's oldest religions still in practice today, and its influence remains strong. Israel is one of the most technologically-advanced societies in the world, and Jewish thought, humor, and philosophy are an important part of American culture. Just look at Woody Allen, for crying out loud. This journal's a good read, examining everything from intermarriage in 20th-Century America to a debate over an ancient law set down before the rise of the Roman Empire, which is characteristic of a system of belief that values interpretation much more highly than most.

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (ProQuest)
One of the oldest and most-respected feminist journals in the country, Frontiers covers a broad range of topics in the context of feminist theory, women's history, and philosophical thought on gender, with a focus on drawing in material that attracts people outside of academic disciplines. For instance, there's a lot of poetry, art, and criticism of work in various media. One article I found that was especially interesting was a review of a feminist methodologist's discussion of the concept of "paradigm" in scientific research and its epistemological implications; specifically, the establishment of a normalized science places boundaries around it that imply that science is a "special" kind of knowledge that is hegemonic in nature, ignoring "the Other/the Rest." As a layman, I'm inclined to think so myself -- science is special! -- but it's an engrossing argument.

Okay ... that's enough for now. Please bear in mind that the stuff I've covered here isn't just a drop in the bucket; it's a drop in the ocean. This post represents a vanishingly small cross-section of the volume of information that's available in the Library. The famous Library of Alexandria didn't have nearly as much in it. And it's all available to Gallaudet students, staff, and faculty for free.

Again, I'd like to remind you: If you have any questions, please feel free to contact a librarian! Here's the page again, in case you're worn out from this little adventure through our electronic offerings!

Next week, a look at e-books as the first of a two-parter: Part 1 will talk about what they are and what purpose they serve, while Part 2 will look at some of what's available.

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Question of the Week
I want to show a film as part of a campus event, but I heard I had to make sure things were okay with the copyright. Can the Library help me with that?
Yes, we can. Sarah Hamrick, our Director of Library Public Services, is very knowledgeable of common copyright issues and can offer suggestions on what to do to make sure everything's legal and above-board. You can e-mail us at library.help@gallaudet.edu for in-depth help or come in and ask at the Service Desk!

New books for the summer

Another indecisive week for our weather. Cool and rainy, hot and rainy, cool and not rainy, hot and not rainy. I'm kind of over it and would like to pack my jacket away ...

Anyway, to insulate myself from the vicissitudes of our weather, I injected some heat into my life by picking up Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey. No nonfiction, no "serious" fiction -- ha -- just flat-out mayhem. It's the story of a magician who is torn away from the woman he loves and tricked into Hell by his friends, where he spends eleven years fighting -- and defeating -- the worst monsters the abyss can throw at him. He finally escapes into modern-day Los Angeles and discovers that things have changed. Not only can one "have Internet" on one's cell phone, but his girlfriend was murdered shortly after his exile, and the leader of the group that sent him to Hell has become something rather godlike.

Upon realizing this -- which involves our main character digging himself out of a grave and immediately robbing a young businessman of all of his money and clothes -- he embarks on what could be called the quintessential rampage and seeks revenge, starting with decapitating one of his old friends within several minutes of his emergence on Earth and keeping the severed head alive for information and abuse as he searches for the people responsible for what has happened to him. Along with an immortal Frenchman, a contemporary punk, a fallen angel, and a few tricks up his sleeve, he tears up LA, leveling city blocks, making friends with the local bartender by tearing apart the neighborhood skinhead extortioners, and discovering the real story behind the creation of the world.

In a nutshell, it's Constantine without the lousy acting and paper-thin plot and with a much, much higher body count. Totally brainless and it doesn't demand anything from you except a little credulity, so it's a good read for when you want a break from the heavy stuff.

As promised, here are a few more breaks from the heavy stuff, fresh off the book-cart and wrapped in today's newspaper:

Graphic Novels

Fables: Legends in Exile
The first installment of the popular Fables series, this volume introduces the reader to the world of the Fables, living storybook characters that have been exiled to our world following a huge war. When I say "living," that's what I mean -- the characters you normally associate with Disney are here turned into gangsters, prostitutes, power-mongers, dictators, and cops, among many other things. The adventure begins with the murder of Rose Red -- Mayor Snow White's sister -- and the subsequent investigation by the Big Bad Wolf. All the volumes are fantastic reads, and we have several available on the shelf.

Y: The Last Man
This series is set after a mysterious plague kills every single male mammal on the face of the Earth -- except two. Yorick and his pet Capuchin monkey, Ampersand, find themselves navigating a world desperate to ensure the perpetuation of the human species, whether through medical advances or sheer bloody-minded conflict. It's fascinating to look at the author's conceptions of a world run by women, and the social upheaval this implies. Gender roles are upended for a certain segment of the population, and interpersonal interaction becomes very different. It's definitely not a graphic novel for chauvinists!

Black Hole
A small town in the 1970s is suddenly afflicted with a mysterious disease of unknown origin. It's a fairly typical premise, except that this particular disease is sexually transmitted among teenagers, and it causes their bodies to mutate in unpredictable ways. The mutations vary from the barely-noticeable, like an extra mouth in your clavicle that can be disguised by a t-shirt, to the dramatic, which can alter your entire appearance and turn you into something that resembles the walking dead. The infected are perfectly healthy (except for The Bug) but are ostracized by their town, for both their physical appearance and what that appearance signifies in terms of their morality, and forced to live in the woods. Black Hole follows the stories of two of those students: a young, attractive woman who sleeps with the wrong boy and finds herself shedding her skin on a weekly basis, and a young man who can't ever seem to get laid -- until he does and grows tentacles out of his sides. It's surreal, sweet, and incredibly disturbing; the art is spooky but the story is engrossing.

Britten and Brülightly
A noirish detective tale, this graphic novel follows Britten, a private-eye who looks French but is actually South American, as he investigates the apparent suicide of his client's husband and uncovers a creepy family conspiracy with ties to organized crime. It's a thin book, but the plot is appropriately moody; so is the art, which is fantastic for this genre. The capper, of course, is that his partner is a talking teabag that lives in his coat.

A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge
A nonfiction graphic novel that tells the story of several New Orleans residents and their lives after Hurricane Katrina, this book is, in a word, incredible. It only takes the author a dozen panels to fully depict what happened to the city in the hurricane. It's an unbelievable representation of one of the worst -- if not the worst -- natural disasters in American history.

Novels

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter
More or less self-explanatory. From the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies comes the story of our 16th President and his secret double life as a vampire slayer -- er, hunter. Based on "secret diaries" given to the author by a major player in the story, this book details the course of Lincoln's life as he discovers that vampires are real, and that his family has had tragic run-ins with them. As he grows older, he begins to hunt them by night while working as a lawyer and politician during the day. After he eventually becomes president, he discovers that Confederate vampires plan to set off a civil war so they can feast on the remains and decides to fight back. Truthfully, it's just a retelling of the real story, with vampires added (guess what John Wilkes Booth really was?), but it's done very well, and ends on a lighter note with Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, which is attended by -- well, read the book!

Backing into Forward: A Memoir
If you've ever read The Phantom Tollbooth, you're familiar with Jules Feiffer's work -- he illustrated the book. He's also been a syndicated cartoonist for over 60 years, although he's mostly done stuff that appears in the likes of the Village Voice more than newspaper comic strips. In any case, his autobiography is fascinating; if you're a fan of Kerouac and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (my review is linked), you'll see elements of both in Backing into Forward. An eminently worthwhile read.

Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang
Chelsea Handler comes back with her third collection of essays, jokes, and stories. After the success of My Horizontal Life and Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea, she appears to have been encouraged to write again. And it's funny ... I just wouldn't recommend it for people who aren't into extremely, extremely off-color anecdotes ...

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
One of the most-lauded books of the year (thus far), this novel follows the story of Major Pettigrew, a sort of quintessential Englishman who is struggling against his unscrupulous family to reclaim a heirloom rifle after the death of his younger brother. Although he also struggles to pass his traditional values on to his son -- who can be most kindly described as a "yuppie" -- he falls into an untraditional friendship with a Pakistani shopkeeper from his neighborhood. It all sounds fairly boring but it's done with a terrific dry wit, and as the plot comes to a head, things get exciting. Almost a modern-day comedy of manners with a nice dash of romance.

Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight
The title is fairly fanciful, and so is the book. It tells the story of a few Russian slum residents who cope with the strangeness of post-Soviet life by escaping into their dreams. There isn't much of a plot -- not a whole lot of explosions or misadventures happen -- but the fleshed-out characters and the odd natures of their individual lives make this novel an absorbing read.

Nonfiction

Love Letters of Great Men and Love Letters of Great Women
As promised, these are two collections of love letters from poets, kings, queens, presidents, authors, politicians, and philosophers. Although it can be hard to get over the sappiness of some of those letters, they offer fascinating insights into the minds -- and hearts -- of people whose names live on today. Good stuff if you're into mushy romance or truly outstanding prose from those best-suited to spout expressions of the ineffable.

Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens
Written to commemorate the centennial of Clemens's death, this book explores the singularly crowded life of one of America's greatest authors. The book itself is written as a comprehensive overview of both Clemens's life and work, mixing analyses of Huckleberry Finn and other works with an exploration of Clemens's complex attitudes toward slavery, American life, and religion in turn-of-the-century Vienna. It's a good way to get to know the man himself and understand his work in the context in which it was undertaken. He's one of my favorite authors, although that's more because of the person he was than because of his work, and it's a terrific book.

Things That Make Us [sic]: The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar Takes on Madison Avenue, Hollywood, the White House, and the World
From the founder of SPOGG comes this hilarious answer to Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a guide to grammar in the modern-day world. Although I think we can safely say that this premise has been done to death -- I've read six or seven books based on this idea since I started working here a year and a half ago -- Things That Make Us [sic] addresses more interesting stuff like spam, The Princess Bride, LOLcats, and letters sent to David Hasselhoff and George W. Bush. And it's funny; if you've read SPOGG's blog, you have a fairly good idea of how snarky the author can be, and she pulls it off beautifully here.

Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan
Published in conjunction with one of the first American exhibitions of Pakistani contemporary art, this book is gorgeous. It offers an unparalleled look at art in Pakistan today and the issues affecting Pakistani society in the wake of the past several decades of struggle and conflict in the region. It's a good way to overcome preconceived notions about life in Pakistan; complementary essays place the works in important cultural, historical and artistic contexts. It's easy to think of Pakistan in terms of news headlines, but the country -- and its people -- are so much more than that, and this book reflects that and offers a valuable aesthetic perspective.

Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories
Groan-worthy pun notwithstanding, this has to be one of the most fascinating books I've seen recently. The title covers it all; this is a collection of stories associated with important pieces of architecture, which are taken as both settings and symbols of their times, places, and cultures. It's not strictly accurate, though: the book actually ends with a chapter at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, titled "In which everything, and nothing at all, has changed." That should give you an idea of the important overviews both of history and of the importance of place in individual lives offered by this book.

Sixteen books in today's post. I'm tired. No Question of the Week in honor of graduation. I'll see you next week.

Good luck to all of our graduates!

Preview: The advent of summer

Our climate appears to be a little indecisive. Last week, things were chilly for a few days, and this week, we've been living with some truly misbegotten humidity coupled with temperatures in the 80s. I am pretty sure we were supposed to have a spring; possibly it came and went at some point in the wee hours one night last month. And now it's time to sweat ...

Fortunately, there's one nice, low-impact activity one can undertake in the out-of-doors, under the shade of a tree, on a chaise lounge by the pool, or on your beach towel as you slowly sizzle: reading!

People say winter's the best time for undertaking the pursuit of a Good Book -- all those hours spent indoors away from the cold and snow naturally lend themselves to a comfortable chair, some hot chocolate, and the latest bestseller -- but I'm a summer guy myself. The National Arboretum, for instance, close to campus, offers tons of spots to relax in when you're in the mood to get close to nature and all the attendant insects; the hill leading up to the western facade of the Capitol, on the other hand, lets you people-watch at the same time. Or even on the green in the middle of campus, which allows for some quiet time and the chance to socialize with passersby.

During my weird weekend last week, I managed to grab some time to slip through Cory Doctorow's Makers. You might remember my review -- written, not-so-coincidentally, last summer -- of his Little Brother. In this case, though, the rebellion isn't against the government, but against Disney. Doctorow has a thing for Disney; it plays a part in most of his novels. He seems to be pretty conflicted: on the one hand, he's captivated by the magic Disney accomplishes through metric tons of papier-mache, but on the other hand, he hates its corporate soullessness and cutthroat protection of intellectual property.

Anyway, in Makers, we follow the careers of Perry and Lester, two renegade engineers who stumble into some major funding from a business genius and accidentally spawn a movement based on the reuse of junk to create weird contraptions; one item you see consistently throughout the novel is a little humanoid robot made of seashells that makes toast. There's also Lester's obsession with creating difference engines out of various materials, like a basic computer built out of hundreds of used soda cans that can perform arithmetic using brown M&Ms. The emergence of 3D printers that can build almost anything quickly and cheaply really gooses the trend and gets a huge percentage of the American population involved.

There's a whole do-it-yourself aesthetic that creates viable economic communities out of squatter camps full of homeless people, and which leads naturally to a theme-park-style ride built in an abandoned Wal-Mart that collects all the fantastically weird stuff that comes out of this movement and lets people vote different things in or out of each segment of the ride. As the ride phenomenon spreads, its various franchises become networked, so that any changes effected by the participants in one part of the country gets propagated throughout the whole system, and a strangely coherent narrative emerges from this collective subconsciousness.

Of course, Disney hates this; the ride, in all its incarnations across the country, directly competes with Disney World, and even the company's own employees are slowly becoming addicted. As Disney scrambles to compete, revamping Fantasyland into a dark, twisted, Goth theme park, things come to a head when disappointed employees start contributing Disney-trademarked stuff to Perry and Lester's ride and Disney immediately takes the opportunity to file an injunction to shut them down. This leads to a fifteen-year lawsuit, the legal process of which, in a burst of financial innovation, is immediately parceled out and sold off to investors looking for a long-term return.

The book is classic Doctorow. Although the main focus is the do-it-yourself lifestyle and its relationship with innovation, it pulls in a lot of ancillary weirdness that makes the world seem a little more fleshed out. For instance, Lester, morbidly obese at the beginning of the book, suddenly pioneers a new procedure that allows overweight people to slim down and muscle up in a matter of weeks -- as long as they consume 10,000 calories per day. This results in the "fatkins," a class of people who are ridiculously good-looking, constantly consume food, and are incredibly lazy. However, as the book continues along its forty-year arc, tragic physiological consequences begin to emerge, eventually impacting Lester himself and lending the end of the book extra emotional weight (which doesn't have anything to do with whether or not he dies, so I'm certainly not giving anything away here).

In general, three thumbs up!

Now that I'm done gushing -- I'm an avid Doctorow fanboy -- what's going on this summer? In the words of each librarian:

Diana Gates
I will be working on the Deaf LibGuides and pathfinders. We will be identifying videos for a video preservation project. I plan to continue with the Deaf Subject file. As usual, I will wrap up and close my "file" on this year's deaf orders and prepare orders for next year.

Laura Jacobi
Just like Bing Crosby in White Christmas, I'm taking the train to Vermont with my pals for several days of hiking -- a great time to catch up on gossip and reading (alas, not singing like Bing). At the Library, I'll be working on a project to reduce costs by cutting subscriptions to little-used items; training staff and student assistants; and writing LibGuides for Fall courses.

Jim McCarthy
Weeding, weeding, and weeding. I also have a backlog of donated items that will be cleared out this summer. I'll also be working on a slight redesign of library.gallaudet.edu, creating tutorials for some of our resources, and, as always, reading a lot and blogging about it. I also plan to attend the American Library Association conference for the very first time! And maybe get a tan ...

Patrick Oberholtzer
I'll be developing and updating LibGuides for my courses, Weeding, weeding, weeding books and journals, working on the Deaf FAQ Web pages, and attending ALA. I also plan to update and expand my technology and software skills by enrolling in courses in Arlington County Education courses as time permits.

Jane Rutherford
Weeding OLD education books that have not been used in 10 years or more. Cleaning up the general periodical shelves and making sure those records in our ALADIN system are correct and understandable. Preparing to retire the end of August by trashing, redistributing, or taking home the things in my office.

The upshot of what you can expect: Cleaner and more up-to-date shelves, more LibGuides and other online resources, a somewhat redesigned Web page, and one less long-time librarian. We're sorry to see Jane go, but very excited on her behalf -- she's earned her retirement many times over, as you can see from all of our plans for this summer; we don't stop when graduation ends.

Next week, you get to look forward to another list of new books!

---

Question of the Week
Does the Library have any videophones?
This is a question that's come up a few times in the past few weeks. I'm not sure why; I could have sworn this was general knowledge. Since it doesn't seem to be, here goes: We have four videophones available for public use, all of which are on the first floor. Three of them are in booths next to the men's room, while there's one in a cubicle in the Deaf Library Study Center near the women's bathroom; the cubicle is tucked away in the corner immediately to the right of the entrance to the room and is easy to miss, so look carefully. It's also usually occupied.