News Blog @ Wellington City Libraries

New Zealand Music Month at Wellington City Libraries – Ends Tomorrow.
Secret CD vouchers all but gone!
Borrow NZ CDs from the Central Library’s Collection and you could win a $20 music voucher from Real Groovy or Music Works.

NZ Music Trivia Quiz – entry time extended now closes Wednesday 7 June – you could win an i-pod shuffle.

NZMM Last Performance, Wednesday 31 May Library and WCC waiata groups combine to entertain you with a short bracket of waiata and are followed by the amazing Ray Ahipene-Mercer and Holden Hohaia duo – just brilliant!

Library Pre-Winter Book Sale
All items 50c – everything must go, unbelievable bargains there for the taking!

Extinction, the secret history of gemstones and the genius of nature’s palate are the topics of some of our Popular science recent picks. In Sex, drugs, and DNA, Michael Stebbins discusses the taboos which work to prevent scientists from plaining discussing their work in public. Esteened Australian scientist Peter Doherty discusses his life in The beginner’s guide to winning the Nobel Prize: a life in science.

Our new travel books for June include Eat pray love, as much a self-help book as memoir, and photographer Mirella Riciardi’s African visions. In Great British bus journeys: travels through unfamous places, David McKie visits unfashionable towns. British Philip Ells asks, Where the hell is Tuvalu?, and becomes a lawyer there.

Whether Scottish indie band Belle and Sebastian or Egyptian gods showing up in 2023 Paris are your thing, our new Fiction (Graphic novels) recent picks page is the webpage to visit. WCL’s new graphic novels range from the cute (A.L.I.E.E.N.) to serious and heartfelt (Joe Sacco depicts his mother’s harrowing WWII experiences). If you thought comics were just for kids, here are some titles to convince you otherwise.

Our fiction genre pick this month is Suspense & thrillers. New titles involve bioterrorism, dying popes, cryptic messages, the secretly-pregnant Lady Celia, a missing Amish child, and undying Wallachian vampires. In Patrick Quinlan’s ‘Smoked’, Smoke Dugan hides from his criminal past, which of course will catch up with him.

Our Classical music picks for June include books on the composers Copland, Shostakovich and Lilburn, plus ‘Composers in the movies : studies in musical biography’. We also feature some new scores by NZ composers.

This month’s History page features the United Nations. In world history for June, Orwell, Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe were born. On 15th June 1959, the Chinese gooseberry was renamed the Kiwi fruit.

New computer books for June cover RSS, Photoshop CS2, Maya 7, switching to Firefox and InDesign CS2. Plus there’s Geeks on call security and privacy, by JR King.

Our Popular non-fiction picks are broad this month – from the crimes and misdemeanours of M15 and M16 to calming signals for dogs, from magic and divination in Russia to climage change. Titles include David Porritt’s thoughts on sustainable capitalism in Capitalism : as if the world matters, and The hip hop generation : young blacks and the crisis in African American culture by Bakari Kitwana.

Yes, it’s time for a new Sue Grafton mystery. What will she do when she’s finished with the alphabet? We also have new mysteries from Lisa Scottoline, Italian Giampiero Rigosi and Jessica Mann.