Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books


The Library's New eAudiobook Service - How would you like to download free audiobooks for your computer or your portable device? The Crawfordsville Public Library has just "rolled out" this new service.

Visit the library to set up an account called NetLibrary. First, log in on a library computer or your own laptop using your library card's barcode. On the library's home page, click on the NetLibrary link at the top of the homepage and then click on "Create a Free Account" in the upper right hand corner to create your account. Once you've created your account, you can download eAudiobooks anywhere at anytime.

One way to use this service for the first time is to log on to NetLibrary and click on the Downloads image, which will take you to a page where NetLibrary helps you decide how to download. These books "check out" for three weeks and you can renew them once for an additional three week period. The eAudiobook knows when it is due and will not play beyond the due date without being renewed.

Note: eAudiobooks are not eBooks. EAudiobooks are books you can listen to; they cannot be burned to a CD. The neat thing about these audiobooks is that you don't need to return them once they "expire".

At the library, ready-to-borrow new books begin with "The Best American Short Stories-2010" edited by Richard Russo & Heidi Pitlor, a collection from U.S. and Canadian Magazines. The series began in 1978 and the list of distinguished yearly editors is fun to read; this volume has 20 stories, with biographies of its authors.

"Death by Black Hole: and other Cosmic Quandaries" by Neil Tyson is "full of fascinating tidbit and frequently humourous essays by one of today's best popularizers of science". Bill Bryson's "At Home" is called A Short History of Private Life; it is an intricate history book and his wit and prose fluency make this, like all his books, entertaining. Mark Vonnegut's "Just like Someone without Mental Illness Only More So" is a memoir, a funny account of coping with mental illness and his calling as a pediatrician. "A Dark Matter" by Peter Straub is an intense psychological and intriguing story labeled "a chilling tour de force". Susan Wiggs' "The Mistress" is Volume Two of her Chicago Fire Trilogy. (The library also has the third volume.)

Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose's "The Nature of Space and Time" is the much publicized account of two approaches to some of the greatest unsolved problems of gravitation and cosmology. "Hawking's effervescent sense of humour frequently enlivens the text." Classic literature joins Facebook as Sarah Schmelling writes what favorite characters and authors like Shakespeare, Jane Austen and James Joyce say there. The book is "Ophelia Joined the Group Maidens Who Don't Float".

Let’s finish this column with mysteries. Jayne Ann Krentz’ "Witchcraft" has a cover displaying a red rose with a needle through the blossom. In the plot this was left on the doorstep of a mystery writer who asks a Napa Valley vineyard owner for help with her fear. "A Nose for Justice" is the first novel in a new series from Rita Mae Brown; leaving a Wall Street career for a Nevada ranch, our heroine and her wire-haired dachshund join her great-aunt and her German Shepherd mix to rediscover history in the late 1800s.