Newbery and Caldecott Medal Awards 2008

The Newbery Medal
The Newbery Medal was named after eighteenth-century British bookseller John Newbery. It is awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.
Medal Winner 2008

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village by Laura Amy Schlitz (Candlewick Press)

Newbery Honor Books
Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis (Scholastic/Scholastic Press)
The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt (Clarion)
Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson (Putnam/GP Putnam's Sons)

Caldecott Medal
The Caldecott Medal was named in honor of nineteenth-century English illustrator Randolph Caldecott. It is awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children.
Medal Winner 2008

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (Scholastic)

Caldecott Honor Books
Henry's Freedom Box: A True Story from the Underground Railroad, illustrated by Kadir Nelson, written by Ellen Levine (Scholastic/Scholastic Press)
First the Egg by Laura Vaccaro Seeger (Roaring Brook/Neal Porter)
The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtin by Peter Sís (Farrar/Frances Foster)

Adventures in Reading

Readers may be interested in the following books which have been added to stock at Galway City Library:

Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers, by Amy Stewart; Algonquin Books
People around the world buy more flowers a year than they do Big Macs, spending billions of dollars annually. We use them to mark our most important events, to express sentiments that might otherwise go unsaid. And we demand perfection. So it’s no surprise that there is a $40 billion global industry devoted to making flowers flawless. Stewart takes us inside the flower trade, bringing to light the complex life of flowers. Who knows? This book may compel us to return to something purer, more local.

A Hundred White Daffodils, by Jane Kenyon; Graywolf Press
Jane Kenyon died of leukaemia in 1995. Accessible, earnest, and devoid of urbane ironies, the essays here focus mostly on either her small (New England) country community or her garden, examining her growing spiritual life and what it is to live while things are going on inside without one's knowledge or consent. Also covered are notions of writing, and, in one of the interviews, a discussion of her struggle with depression. The book succeeds in illuminating a poet and woman of remarkable presence.

Another Beauty, by Adam Zagajewski; University of Georgia Press
Zagajewski is one of Poland's most important poets. Born as Poland was delivered from Nazism to Communism, Zagajewski became philosopher and poet in a society in which ideology always trumped reality and excellence was not always rewarded. This elegant scrapbook is full of pithy and compelling observations on art and society, of luminous descriptions of Krakow and Paris, where Zagajewski now lives. If not a book for everyone, it will be taken very close to heart by those who decide it is definitely for them.

Over The Edge Celebrates Fifth Birthday

The first ‘Over The Edge: Open Reading’ of 2008 takes place in Galway City Library on Thursday, January 24th, 6.30-8.00pm.

The Featured Readers are Peter Guy, Jenny McCudden & Pat Boran. The reading is sponsored by Poetry Ireland. This is a very special occasion as it is now exactly five years since Over The Edge was born in Galway City Library in January 2003.

Peter Guy is a senior researcher and fellow of the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies based in ITT Dublin. He has been published in a number of Irish and international periodicals, including The Cúirt Annual, Iota, Poetry Nottingham, Comstock Review, Quarterly West, Indiana Review and others. He happily divides his time between west Dublin, east Limerick and his native Connemara.

Jenny McCudden is originally from Naas in county Kildare. She now lives in Galway and works as Western Correspondent for TV3 News. Jenny began her career as a journalist working for the Sunday World and the Westmeath Offaly Independent. She spent five years in the UK, working for the BBC, before returning to take up her current position with TV3. She has always enjoyed writing fiction and poetry.

Pat Boran was born in Portlaoise in 1963 and currently lives in Dublin, where he is Director of Dedalus Press. Prior to taking over the press in 2005, he published four collections of poetry with Dedalus: The Unwound Clock (1990), which won the Patrick Kavanagh Award, Familiar Things (1993), The Shape of Water (1996) and As the Hand, the Glove (2001). His New and Selected Poems (first published by Salt Publishing in 2005) was reissued recently, with minor revisions, by Dedalus. A regular reviewer of new poetry and fiction titles in a number of Irish national newspapers and journals, he also presents The Poetry Programme on RTÉ Radio 1.

As usual there will be an open-mic after the Featured Readers have finished. New readers are always particularly welcome. The MC for the evening will be Susan Millar DuMars. For further details phone 087-6431748.

The questions of life

Fernando Savater is one of Spain's most eminent philosophers. He believes that books make education a truly liberating experience. He has stated that reading is fundamental in one’s educational development. "Education concerns all citizens because it undergirds human relationships, participation and tolerance. In this regard, reflective reading—in its role as a basic tool in the learning process—is essential to sustaining the health and resilience of the social fabric.

'Without falling into elitist attitudes, we have to recognize that the ability to read a book has an educational and even moral dimension that cannot be ignored."

Adventures in Reading

Readers may be interested in the following books which have been added to stock at Galway City Library

Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev, by Robert Dessaix, Picador
A writer searches out the significant sites in the life of Ivan Turgenev and ponders love, obsession, creation and literary celebrity. This is an enchanting memoir of a search for the soul of Russian writer Turgenev. Feeling the urge to know his old friend better, Dessaix set out to visit Turgenev's various homes in Germany, France and Russia. Dessaix was perplexed by the writer's love life; his passion for married opera singer Pauline Viardot led him into a lifelong triangle with her and her husband. Simply, gracefully and wisely written, saturated with the sorrows and joys of years.

Emily Dickinson's Gardens: A Celebration of a Poet and Gardener, by Marta McDowell, McGraw Hill
Welcome to Emily Dickinson's gardening year. Following the seasons around the calendar--from the first buds of spring to winter's last days--this unique volume invites you to accompany the poet on her solitary wildflower excursions through the fields of old Amherst; and, best of all, take a stroll along the flagstone paths of her exquisite Victorian gardens. This is the "brighter garden" that Emily Dickinson created and nurtured at her home in Amherst, and it's all here for you to enjoy and re-create in your own backyard.

The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, Vintage
Last week marked the centenary of the birth of Simone de Beauvoir. An accomplished novelist, Beauvoir won the Prix Goncourt for The Mandarins in 1954. Yet on her 100th anniversary, it is to The Second Sex, her epochal essay from 1949 on the oppression of women, that we should return. Ever since it was published, The Second Sex has provoked intense responses. In the years before the women's movement, The Second Sex was a source of inspiration and insight for countless women. "It changed my life!" is a refrain one often hears. The Second Sex is a wonderfully energetic book. (Guardian).

To read or not to read, that is the question

Reading

Books are the most amazing beginning of freedom and brotherhood. They are a horizon of happiness of reflected light, which allows us to feel the salvation, the enlightenment that is the opposite of the trivial space of the already known thing.In the silence of the writing the lines speak to us, a new voice sounds, a regenerative one.Through literature we have the opportunity to discover a new world, a world that we never would have discovered without the power of words.
One of the most amazing prodigies of human life and of cultural life is that it is constituted by the possibility of living through other words, to feel other feelings and to have new thoughts and visions.
Literature is not just the principle and origin of intellectual freedom; it is a universe for a free world of imagination, a territory of infinite possibility.
Books are doors that nobody can close against us.
The most dangerous censorship would be if we censored ourselves and did not read anymore, because without reading, we would loose the passion of understanding the happiness of knowing.
If we get used to being nonconformist with words, we will end up by being nonconformist with the facts. Liberty does not admit any conformity.

'Literature is not just the principle and origin of intellectual freedom;
It is a universe of a free world of imagination,
A territory of infinite possibility'

Emilio Lledó

Translated and compiled by Vanessa Lafarga Kärnä
Galway Public Libraries

Adventures in Reading

Readers may be interested in the following books which have been added to stock at Galway City Library:

What I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt
The ardent exchange of ideas underlies all manner of passionate action in this dark tale of two intertwined New York families. After
buying an astonishing painting in a SoHo gallery, art historian Leo Hertzberg tracks down the artist, Bill Wechsler, and they launch a lifelong friendship with all the attendant joys and sorrows. Hustvedt is terrific at evoking the milieu of the haute bourgeoisie—the house in Vermont and the wine-drenched meals. A remarkable achievement of Siri Hustvedt's prose, with its attention to nuance and intricacy, is its demonstration that friendship is a powerful form of intelligence.


Albert Camus: A Life, by Olivier Todd, Da Capo Press
This is a rich description of Camus's life in colonial Algiers, wartime Paris, and his relationship with his immediate family, wives, and lovers. Todd's use of personal correspondence, interviews with family members, and previously unused public records reveals a complex man who was a philosopher, novelist, literary editor, and journalist at odds with fellow French intellectuals over his political beliefs. This is a fine portrait of a man whose ideas on freedom, nationalism, and violence are as necessary today as they were half a century ago.

The Questions of Life: An Invitation to Philosophy, by Fernando Savater, Polity
Savater is one of Spain's most eminent philosophers. He believes that books make education a truly liberating experience. He has stated that reading is fundamental in one’s educational development. "Education concerns all citizens because it undergirds human relationships, participation and tolerance. In this regard, reflective reading—in its role as a basic tool in the learning process—is essential to sustaining the health and resilience of the social fabric. Without falling into elitist attitudes, we have to recognize that the ability to read a book has an educational and even moral dimension that cannot be ignored."