Sunday 27 November 2011
HELP!
I've been processing dozens of new books into the library and my brain is so crammed with titles that I can't choose my next book to read! Help me out. What have you read recently or what are you reading that you would recommend?
Saturday 12 November 2011
GUNNERKRIGG COURT: ONLINE GRAPHIC NOVEL
I found this while browsing book sites today. Gunnerkrigg Court sounds like a series that would captivate Harry Potter fans but also mesmerize readers of quirky science fiction. There are three volumes available, but I'm not going to purchase them right now as the second volume is scarce and expensive. Fortunately, you can read the comic online at http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/archive_page.php?comicID=1
Wednesday 9 November 2011
Win a copy of INHERITANCE!
Get your book reviews in! Good luck!
Monday 7 November 2011
TWO AMAZING NOVELS
While the Eragon fans settle in to read the fourth and final installment, I have two suggestions for the rest of you.
The first is Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor. I feel certain that this book is going to be the next huge word-of-mouth hit. Taylor presents two breathtaking worlds: modern day Prague and a magical world mired in conflict between angels and chimera. The action is epic, the mysteries deep and the characters intriguing and sympathetic. The chemistry between the two main characters makes Edward and Bella seem like distant acquaintances. Here's a synopsis:
Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky.
In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low.
And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherwordly war.
Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious "errands"; she speaks many languages--not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out.
When one of the strangers--beautiful, haunted Akiva--fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?
I just finished reading the second novel, The Scorpio Races, by Maggie Stiefvater. She is the best-selling author of Shiver, Linger and Forever. The action in the standalone novel is set on the small island of Thisby, where every fall the ocean tide brings large, powerful and vicious water horses to the shore. For generations, young men have caught and tried to tame these beautiful monsters in order to ride in the Scorpio Races, a competition that crowns one champion a year, but leaves many mangled bodies on the sand.
Two of the competitors are the protagonists of the story. Sean Kendrick, a skilled horse-whisperer, has raced and won many times on the back of his beloved red water horse, Corr. This year he races in order to win the life of his dreams or lose everything. Puck is the first girl to enter the race and she does so on her ordinary island pony, Dove. Even though no one believes she has a chance to win, and that in all likelihood she will lose her life in the race, she competes in order to keep her family together in the home she has always known.
Gradually , Sean Kendrick and Puck are drawn together in their quest. Their developing relationship seems a fragile thing in the midst of the dark magic enveloping the island.
You will be drawn in by the authenticity of the characters and the often explosive action in this story.
Read it!
The first is Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor. I feel certain that this book is going to be the next huge word-of-mouth hit. Taylor presents two breathtaking worlds: modern day Prague and a magical world mired in conflict between angels and chimera. The action is epic, the mysteries deep and the characters intriguing and sympathetic. The chemistry between the two main characters makes Edward and Bella seem like distant acquaintances. Here's a synopsis:
Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky.
In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low.
And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherwordly war.
Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious "errands"; she speaks many languages--not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out.
When one of the strangers--beautiful, haunted Akiva--fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?
I just finished reading the second novel, The Scorpio Races, by Maggie Stiefvater. She is the best-selling author of Shiver, Linger and Forever. The action in the standalone novel is set on the small island of Thisby, where every fall the ocean tide brings large, powerful and vicious water horses to the shore. For generations, young men have caught and tried to tame these beautiful monsters in order to ride in the Scorpio Races, a competition that crowns one champion a year, but leaves many mangled bodies on the sand.
Two of the competitors are the protagonists of the story. Sean Kendrick, a skilled horse-whisperer, has raced and won many times on the back of his beloved red water horse, Corr. This year he races in order to win the life of his dreams or lose everything. Puck is the first girl to enter the race and she does so on her ordinary island pony, Dove. Even though no one believes she has a chance to win, and that in all likelihood she will lose her life in the race, she competes in order to keep her family together in the home she has always known.
Gradually , Sean Kendrick and Puck are drawn together in their quest. Their developing relationship seems a fragile thing in the midst of the dark magic enveloping the island.
You will be drawn in by the authenticity of the characters and the often explosive action in this story.
Read it!
Saturday 5 November 2011
INHERITANCE IS FINALLY HERE!!
Thursday 3 November 2011
RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! ZOMBIES HAVE INVADED THE LIBRARY...
DEVOUR BOOKS, NOT BRAINS: Come in and see our terrifying display!
Halloween may be over, but the zombie trend has just started. Zombies have grabbed hold of our imaginations the way vampires did a few years back and they are everywhere: T.V., movies and, of course, books. We have a number of great zombie reads, from the truly outrageous to the frankly yucky to the chillingly terrifying. Even the undead can be well-read.
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars by Max Brooks
"The end was near.” —Voices from the Zombie War
The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.
The Enemy by Charlie Higson
They'll chase you. They'll rip you open. They'll feed on you...When the sickness came, every parent, policeman, politician - every adult - fell ill. The lucky ones died. The others are crazed, confused and hungry. Only children under fourteen remain, and they're fighting to survive. Now there are rumours of a safe place to hide. And so a gang of children begin their quest across London, where all through the city - down alleyways, in deserted houses, underground - the grown-ups lie in wait. But can they make it there - alive?
We also have the sequel The Dead in the library.
The Affinity Bridge by George Mann
Welcome to the bizarre and dangerous world of Victorian London, a city teetering on the edge of revolution. Its people are ushering in a new era of technology, dazzled each day by new inventions. Airships soar in the skies over the city, whilst ground trains rumble through the streets and clockwork automatons are programmed to carry out menial tasks in the offices of lawyers, policemen and journalists.
But beneath this shiny veneer of progress lurks a sinister side. For this is also a world where ghostly policemen haunt the fog-laden alleyways of Whitechapel, where cadavers can rise from the dead and where Sir Maurice Newbury, Gentleman Investigator for the Crown, works tirelessly to protect the Empire from her foes.
When an airship crashes in mysterious circumstances, Sir Maurice and his recently appointed assistant Miss Veronica Hobbes are called in to investigate. Meanwhile, Scotland Yard is baffled by a spate of grisly murders and a terrifying plague is ravaging the slums of the city.
So begins an adventure quite unlike any other, a thrilling steampunk mystery and the first in the series of "Newbury & Hobbes" investigations.
You are so Undead to Me by Stacey Jay
Fifteen-year-old Megan Berry is a Zombie Settler by birth, which means she's part-time shrink to a bunch of dead people with a whole lot of issues.
All Megan wants is to be normal and go to homecoming, of course. Unfortunately, it's a little difficult when your dates keep getting interrupted by a bunch of slobbering Undead.
Things are about to get even more complicated for Megan. Someone in school is using black magic to turn average, angsty Undead into flesh-eating Zombies, and it's looking like homecoming will turn out to be a very different kind of party the bloody kind.
Megan must stop the Zombie apocalypse descending on Carol, Arkansas. Her life and more importantly, homecoming depends on it.
I Kissed a Zombie and I Liked It by Adam Selzer
Algonquin “Ali” Rhodes, the high school newspaper’s music critic, meets an intriguing singer, Doug, while reviewing a gig. He’s a weird-looking guy—goth, but he seems sincere about it, like maybe he was into it back before it was cool. She introduces herself after the set, asking if he lives in Cornersville, and he replies, in his slow, quiet murmur, “Well, I don’t really live there, exactly. . . .”
When Ali and Doug start dating, Ali is falling so hard she doesn’t notice a few odd signs: he never changes clothes, his head is a funny shape, and he says practically nothing out loud. Finally Marie, the school paper’s fashion editor, points out the obvious: Doug isn’t just a really sincere goth. He’s a zombie. Horrified that her feelings could have allowed her to overlook such a flaw, Ali breaks up with Doug, but learns that zombies are awfully hard to get rid of—at the same time she learns that vampires, a group as tightly-knit as the mafia, don’t think much of music critics who make fun of vampires in reviews. . . .
Feed by Mira Grant
In 2014, two experimental viruses—a genetically engineered flu strain designed by Dr. Alexander Kellis, intended to act as a cure for the common cold, and a cancer-killing strain of Marburg, known as "Marburg Amberlee"—escaped the lab and combined to form a single airborne pathogen that swept around the world in a matter of days. It cured cancer. It stopped a thousand cold and flu viruses in their tracks.
It raised the dead.
Millions died in the chaos that followed. The summer of 2014 was dubbed "The Rising," and only the lessons learned from a thousand zombie movies allowed mankind to survive. Even then, the world was changed forever. The mainstream media fell, Internet news acquired an undeniable new legitimacy, and the CDC rose to a new level of power.
Set twenty years after the Rising, the Newsflesh trilogy follows a team of bloggers, led by Georgia and Shaun Mason, as they search for the brutal truths behind the infection. Danger, deceit, and betrayal lurk around every corner, as does the hardest question of them all:
When will you rise?
Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
In Mary's world there are simple truths. The Sisterhood always knows best. The Guardians will protect and serve. The Unconsecrated will never relent. And you must always mind the fence that surrounds the village; the fence that protects the village from the Forest of Hands and Teeth. But, slowly, Mary’s truths are failing her. She’s learning things she never wanted to know about the Sisterhood and its secrets, and the Guardians and their power, and about the Unconsecrated and their relentlessness. When the fence is breached and her world is thrown into chaos, she must choose between her village and her future—between the one she loves and the one who loves her. And she must face the truth about the Forest of Hands and Teeth. Could there be life outside a world surrounded in so much death?
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars by Max Brooks
The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.
The Enemy by Charlie Higson
They'll chase you. They'll rip you open. They'll feed on you...When the sickness came, every parent, policeman, politician - every adult - fell ill. The lucky ones died. The others are crazed, confused and hungry. Only children under fourteen remain, and they're fighting to survive. Now there are rumours of a safe place to hide. And so a gang of children begin their quest across London, where all through the city - down alleyways, in deserted houses, underground - the grown-ups lie in wait. But can they make it there - alive?
We also have the sequel The Dead in the library.
The Affinity Bridge by George Mann
But beneath this shiny veneer of progress lurks a sinister side. For this is also a world where ghostly policemen haunt the fog-laden alleyways of Whitechapel, where cadavers can rise from the dead and where Sir Maurice Newbury, Gentleman Investigator for the Crown, works tirelessly to protect the Empire from her foes.
When an airship crashes in mysterious circumstances, Sir Maurice and his recently appointed assistant Miss Veronica Hobbes are called in to investigate. Meanwhile, Scotland Yard is baffled by a spate of grisly murders and a terrifying plague is ravaging the slums of the city.
So begins an adventure quite unlike any other, a thrilling steampunk mystery and the first in the series of "Newbury & Hobbes" investigations.
You are so Undead to Me by Stacey Jay
Fifteen-year-old Megan Berry is a Zombie Settler by birth, which means she's part-time shrink to a bunch of dead people with a whole lot of issues.
All Megan wants is to be normal and go to homecoming, of course. Unfortunately, it's a little difficult when your dates keep getting interrupted by a bunch of slobbering Undead.
Things are about to get even more complicated for Megan. Someone in school is using black magic to turn average, angsty Undead into flesh-eating Zombies, and it's looking like homecoming will turn out to be a very different kind of party the bloody kind.
Megan must stop the Zombie apocalypse descending on Carol, Arkansas. Her life and more importantly, homecoming depends on it.
I Kissed a Zombie and I Liked It by Adam Selzer
Algonquin “Ali” Rhodes, the high school newspaper’s music critic, meets an intriguing singer, Doug, while reviewing a gig. He’s a weird-looking guy—goth, but he seems sincere about it, like maybe he was into it back before it was cool. She introduces herself after the set, asking if he lives in Cornersville, and he replies, in his slow, quiet murmur, “Well, I don’t really live there, exactly. . . .”
When Ali and Doug start dating, Ali is falling so hard she doesn’t notice a few odd signs: he never changes clothes, his head is a funny shape, and he says practically nothing out loud. Finally Marie, the school paper’s fashion editor, points out the obvious: Doug isn’t just a really sincere goth. He’s a zombie. Horrified that her feelings could have allowed her to overlook such a flaw, Ali breaks up with Doug, but learns that zombies are awfully hard to get rid of—at the same time she learns that vampires, a group as tightly-knit as the mafia, don’t think much of music critics who make fun of vampires in reviews. . . .
Feed by Mira Grant
It raised the dead.
Millions died in the chaos that followed. The summer of 2014 was dubbed "The Rising," and only the lessons learned from a thousand zombie movies allowed mankind to survive. Even then, the world was changed forever. The mainstream media fell, Internet news acquired an undeniable new legitimacy, and the CDC rose to a new level of power.
Set twenty years after the Rising, the Newsflesh trilogy follows a team of bloggers, led by Georgia and Shaun Mason, as they search for the brutal truths behind the infection. Danger, deceit, and betrayal lurk around every corner, as does the hardest question of them all:
When will you rise?
Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
In Mary's world there are simple truths. The Sisterhood always knows best. The Guardians will protect and serve. The Unconsecrated will never relent. And you must always mind the fence that surrounds the village; the fence that protects the village from the Forest of Hands and Teeth. But, slowly, Mary’s truths are failing her. She’s learning things she never wanted to know about the Sisterhood and its secrets, and the Guardians and their power, and about the Unconsecrated and their relentlessness. When the fence is breached and her world is thrown into chaos, she must choose between her village and her future—between the one she loves and the one who loves her. And she must face the truth about the Forest of Hands and Teeth. Could there be life outside a world surrounded in so much death?
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