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Teen Blog

Reading, Wellington, and whatever else – teenblog@wcl.govt.nz

Month: February 2012

More New e-Books

A couple of trilogies added this week:

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins. Read it on your e-book reader before the movie comes out! Also, there’s Catching Fire and Mockingjay. Like print books, library e-books are reservable – you will be notified by email when they’re ready for you to collect (you have a couple of days to do so).

Shiver, Linger and Forever by Maggie Stiefvater, which form the Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy, about a pack of wolves who are in reality humans infected with a virus.

If you want to find out more about library e-books, there’s more information in this post right here.

Waiting on Wednesday

Here are some interesting titles we’ve ordered recently.

15 Days Without a Head, Dave Cousins. Laurence lives with his six year old brother Jay, and his alcoholic mother. One day his mother doesn’t come home from work, and Laurence is left to care for himself and his brother, fearing that their predicament will be discovered, and they will be separated. Happily, Laurence discovers a friend in Mina, who is keen to help him track down his mum. The author’s blog is here.

Starters, Lissa Price. Years ago (although still in the future) a killer bug (deliberately spread) wiped out anyone who was not vaccinated against it. Those who were were the very old and the very young. Callie and her younger brother have no grandparents to look after them, so they live life by their wits, on the run. Things seem to be looking up when they come across Prime Destinations, a group run by The Old Man: a potential income source. Prime Destinations organises for teenagers rent their bodies out to the older people who’d like to be young again (yes, we know, yuck, can you imagine?), using neurochip technology. When it’s Callie’s turn her neurochip malfunctions and she wakes up in her wealthy renter’s life.

Department 19: The Rising, Will Hill. The sequel to Department 19, which people said some touchingly lovely things about (such as “…plenty of high-octane action, groovy specialized vampire-fighting equipment, buckets of gore, intriguing historical side trips and even a little romance…” (from Amazon) which, let’s face it, if you were an author you’d be happy with).

There is an active Facebook page (Department 19 exists!) with interactive elements. And a book trailer:

Great Read – So Yesterday: a novel

So Yesterday: a novel by Scott Westerfeld

Some things are in fashion, and everyone knows. But where do these trends start? Someone did it first, before it was cool/trendy/whatever term you like, and then somehow everyone else followed. Hunter doesn’t start these things – he’s the next step, a trendsetter, he gets paid to find and identify things that are actually cool and not just weird. His boss then sells these things onto various companies who sell the “cool” product to consumers everywhere. It’s a good deal for Hunter until he meets Jen, an innovator who designs shoelaces. Together they have to find Hunter’s boss who disappears amidst a brief sighting of the most fantastic shoes Jen and Hunter have ever seen.

A mystery story which is still secondary to the fact that Scott Westerfeld has somehow come up with a (scarily possible) explanation for how trends are started and then spread. Great read, recommended if you like any of his other books or Unidentified by Rae Mariz.

Grammy winning CDs

The 54th annual Grammy awards were held last night in Los Angeles, amongst the 78 winners (78! There used to be more, last year it was 109) were a few that can be found on the YA CD shelves. Read on…

21 by Adele won six awards or something crazy like that, Album of the year is the most noteworthy. Confusingly, Rolling In The Deep won Record of the year and Song of the year, I couldn’t tell you the difference between those categories.

Wasting Light by The Foo Fighters was another big winner, with four. They won awards in both the “Rock” and the “Hard rock/Metal” categories, so they are to be commended for being “genre-spanning”.

Watch The Throne by Kanye West & Jay-Z features the song Otis which won an award for “Best rap performance”. Since it features an Otis Redding sample I suppose that kind of means he wins too. Well done, Otis!

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West won the other three rap categories. Well done to Kanye by keeping busy enough to release two albums this year, thus doubling his chances of winning Grammys. Shrewd move, Kanye, shrewd move indeed.

Own The Night by Lady Antebellum won Best country album. In our catalogue it is under “Pop”, but that is probably just because we do not have a “Country” category in the YA section.

Even though Taylor Swift’s Speak Now came out in 2010, the song Mean came out as a single in 2011, therefore it was eligible to win Best country song and Best solo country performance. Which it did. Grammy voters love Taylor Swift.

Did any of your favourites win?

Hot New e-Books

Huzzah. Here’s a selection of e-book additions to the library collection:

Drink, Slay, Love, Sarah Beth Durst

Guardian of the Dead, Karen Healey

Crossed, Ally Condie

Clockwork Prince, Cassandra Clare

The Red Shoe, Ursula Dubosarsky

Wintergirls, Laurie Halse Anderson

Note that the library e-books are available to borrow for two weeks, and you don’t have to worry about overdues (or losing them, obvs.). If you’re unsure what you need to do to start using the library’s e-book collection, then have a look at this step-by-step help guide (it should have all the answers).

Additionally, we have some new downloadable audiobooks, for example:

The Scorpio Races, Maggie Stiefvater

Twisted, Laurie Halse Anderson

Dead End in Norvelt, Jack Gantos

Beads, Boys and Bangles, Sophia Bennett

I Was Jane Austen’s Best Friend, Cora Harrison

If you’re not sure you want to commit to an audiobook, you can test-drive it by listening to a sample, and if the title you want is not available, you can reserve it – you’ll get a notification by email when it’s ready to collect (note that you only have a couple of days to pick up your reserves).

 

What people are looking for

Here’s a Top 10 list of the most popular searches on the library’s Easyfind catalogue in January 2012, followed by some examples of “when good searches go wrong” (don’t try those at home).

Top 10 Easyfind Searches

  1. the hunger games
  2. hunger games
  3. harry potter
  4. tintin
  5. cherub
  6. downton abbey
  7. diary of a wimpy kid
  8. game of thrones
  9. geronimo stilton
  10. road code

Other interesting popular searches include: Eragon, Glee, Robert Muchamore, Cassandra Clare, Naruto, and building android apps.

Strays, Orphans and Waifs 🙁

  1. downtown abbey
  2. dairy of a wimpy kid
  3. the book theif
  4. kattyperry
  5. confessions of gerogia nicholson
  6. business inteligence
  7. blood promsie
  8. roald dahi
  9. fittle princesses fittle princsses fittl princsses
  10. the weeknd

<3 typos

Like this? Like that!

If you’re looking for readalike suggestions (or a way to waste much time), then try this. It’s a very cool home-made (by someone very clever) visual book-recommender thingy, based on Amazon’s large database of items. It uses the information Amazon gathers about customer purchases to create links (myriads of links!) between your favourite titles, and other similar ones.

For example, here’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan using the gizmo. If you are using a mouse with a scroll button, scrolling will zoom in and out, revealing a really large web of possibilities. Another example: Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green.

Very cool.

(found via mediabistro.com)