Story hours start next week!

Don't forget that story hours begin next week. Baby storytime (birth -18 months) will be on Tuesdays at 10:30am, preschool storyhour (3-5 years) will be on Wednesdays at 10:30am and toddler tales (18 months - 3 years) will be on Thursdays at 10:30am. Details are on our Children's programs page.

Want to know what you're really eating - both good and bad? Check out A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, now in its 7th edition, for a thoroughly detailed and understandable explanation of food additives.

From Publishers Weekly: "In her engaging new tearjerker, Hood (The Knitting Circle) follows several families as they attempt to adopt daughters from China. Holding down the center is Maya Lange, who, as head of the Red Thread Adoption Agency, is the prospective parents' guide through the adoption process. Childless Maya is driven by a desire to make amends for a tragic accident in her past, though her clients have their own share of heartbreak-miscarriages and infertility-and, predictably, the expectations and reservations about parenthood that they confide to Maya are shaped by a host of personal issues. Hood's sensitive depiction of her characters' hopes and fears makes for a moving story of dedication, forgiveness, and love."

New for all the Master Chef wannabes!

From the publisher: "Turn a passion for food into the job of a lifetime with the insider advice in Culinary Careers.

Working in food can mean cooking on the line in a restaurant, of course, but there are so many more career paths available. No one knows this better than Rick Smilow—president of the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE), the award-winning culinary school in New York City—who has seen ICE graduates go on to prime jobs both in and out of professional kitchens. Tapping into that vast alumni network and beyond, Culinary Careers is the only career book to offer candid portraits of dozens and dozens of coveted jobs at all levels to help you find your dream job.

With information on educational programs and a bird’s-eye view of the industry, Culinary Careers is a must-have resource for anyone looking to break into the food world, whether you’re a first-time job seeker or a career changer looking for your next step."

For 20 years beginning in 1967, Charles Kuralt wandered America's byways in search of the unusual and the overlooked. He and his small crew logged more than a million miles and wore out six motor homes. For his homespun vignettes of everyday life, Kuralt won an Emmy and became a household name. Now his stories are being released on DVD - check them out!

From Library Journal: "A 26-year veteran of The New Yorker, Menaker here probes the origin and subtexts of everyday human interactions, exploring how conversations take shape and progress. At their best, they're a form of art, but conversation is not always smooth and charming. For people who often find their way into conversational pitfalls, Menaker packs an entire chapter full of advice. He differentiates between conversation that's aimless and purposeless and, among other topics, takes aim at name-droppers. In the hands of a less-skilled writer, this topic could have drowned in textbook-style overanalysis, but Menaker's book is filled with ample doses of humor and should be especially welcomed by wordsmiths and conversationalists."

Book club in a bag

Each year the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library award the Minnesota Book Awards to Minnesota authors, illustrators, and book artists in 8 categories. Categories include children's literature, general non-fiction, genre fiction, memoir and creative non-fiction, poetry, young people's literature, Minnesota, novel and short story. Titles for the Book Club in a Bag kits are selected from Minnesota Book Award winners and can be checked out through the library. Each kit includes 10 copies of a book, reader guides, and bookmarks in a handy canvas bag.

REQUESTS:
To find the Book Club in a Bag kits in AquaBrowser, type Book Club in a Bag in the search box (make sure you are searching all libraries as the kits are located in the SELCO office). Only library staff may request these kits, so if you'd like one, give us a call and we'll get it for you. The kits can be checked out for up to a month at a time, and you may check out more than one kit at a time.


BOOK CLUB IN A BAG KITS AVAILABLE:

* The Latehomecomer
* The Plague of Doves
* Hard Work and a Good Deal
* The Compassionate Carnivore
* National Monuments
* Twelve Long Months
* Stalking Susan

Great new thriller

John Verdon is a first time author, but given the reviews for his book, Think of a Number, he has a promising career ahead. The Washington Post called it "…inventive and entertaining…The hard-edged characters and gritty plot recall Chandler's "mean streets," but the ornate puzzles laid before Verdon's detective might have challenged the "little grey cells" of Hercule Poirot…Verdon plays fair with the reader, crafting the puzzles with elaborate care and dangling the clues in plain sight. When he finally springs the solution to the "think of a number" conundrum, you'll never see it coming—but all the numbers add up."

Recently nominated for The Man Booker Prize, England's most prestigious award for contemporary fiction, Parrot and Olivier in America is an irrepressibly funny new novel set in early nineteenth-century America. Olivier - an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville - is the traumatized child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English printer. They are born on different sides of history, but their lives will be connected by an enigmatic one-armed marquis. When Olivier sets sail for the nascent United States - ostensibly to make a study of the penal system, but more precisely to save his neck from one more revolution - Parrot will be there, too: as spy for the marquis, and as protector, foe, and foil for Olivier. As the narrative shifts between the perspectives of Parrot and Olivier, between their picaresque adventures apart and together - in love and politics, prisons and finance, homelands and brave new lands - a most unlikely friendship begins to take hold.

Jewel of Como celebrates one of the most beloved buildings in Minnesota and, from the standpoint of horticulture and architecture, one of the most important in the world. This stunning new book published by the Afton Historical Society Press tells the story of the Marjorie McNeely Conservatory at Como Park in St. Paul, Minnesota, in words and pictures--breathtaking color photos of the conservatory today as well as historic photos that bring to life its rich and sometimes tumultuous past.

Justin Cronin's The Passage is one of the most popular - and best reviewed - novels of the year. From Publishers Weekly: "Fans of vampire fiction who are bored by the endless hordes of sensitive, misunderstood Byronesque bloodsuckers will revel in Cronin's engrossingly horrific account of a post-apocalyptic America overrun by the gruesome reality behind the wish-fulfillment fantasies. When a secret project to create a super-soldier backfires, a virus leads to a plague of vampiric revenants that wipes out most of the population. One of the few bands of survivors is the Colony, a FEMA-established island of safety bunkered behind massive banks of lights that repel the "virals," or "dracs"-but a small group realizes that the aging technological defenses will soon fail. When members of the Colony find a young girl, Amy, living outside their enclave, they realize that Amy shares the virals' agelessness, but not the virals' mindless hunger, and they embark on a search to find answers to her condition." Check it out!