Geek Mom: Projects, Tips, and Adventures for Moms and Their 21st-Century Families

Posted on March 2, 2013 by Susan

I am a rather geeky mom and always looking for new ways to share my geekiness with my kid. So I picked up Geek Mom, a book based on the wired.com GeekMom blog, for safe, fun projects to do at home. I really enjoyed looking through this book. The projects are varied and for kids of all different ages from 3 on up to late teens. There are also a few projects just for mom (like the Renaissance style corset). There are a few ideas I particularly liked (like the “One Thousand Blank White Cards” game, the homemade lava lamp, and all the ideas related to food) but there were great ideas for a variety of interests.

Each project included in this book only has a few pages of explanation, so if you’re looking for more, you’ll have to use your internet searching skills for more complete instructions. You might try the website http://www.instructables.com/, recommended in the book.

We also have a few books specifically for geeky dads. Geek Dad : Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share by Ken Denmead and Handy Dad : 25 Awesome Projects for Dads and Kids by Todd Davis. And wired.com also has a GeekDad blog.

Scarlet by Marissa Meyer

Posted on February 5, 2013 by Susan

The second book in the Lunar Chronicles after Cinder, Scarlet is the story of Little Red Riding Hood set in a dystopian future where the world is under constant threat from aliens living on the moon and plague has devastated the population.

Scarlet lives on a farm near a small town in France with her grandmother. When her grandmother goes missing, Scarlet does everything she can to try to find her, including trying to get information out of a very intimidating professional fighter known as Wolf. Wolf may be involved in her grandmother’s disappearance, or he may simply be trying to help her. With no other information about how to find her grandmother, Scarlet goes with Wolf to Paris to confront the gang he says took her, the Order of the Pack.

Cinder’s story is also continued in this novel. Her goal is to find out more about her past since she still has no memory of her childhood before New Beijing.

The third book in the series, Cress, is set to be released in 2014. While Scarlet didn’t have quite the cliffhanger Cinder did, I still can’t wait to see what happens to these characters.

Serengeti Spy: Views from a Hidden Camera on the Plains of East Africa by Anup Shah

Posted on February 2, 2013 by Susan

I haven’t been in much of a mood to read lately (strange, I know). So I’ve been picking up some of the very cool photography books we’ve gotten at the library lately. In December I looked through Dancers Among Us (and reviewed it). I also looked through and enjoyed Underwater Dogs by Seth Casteel. Recently I picked up Serengeti Spy by Anuup Shah, a beautiful book filled with pictures taken by a hidden camera in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania and the Maasai Mara Natural Reserve in Kenya.

Shah captured the images in Serengeti Spy by hiding a camera in a small housing that was then covered in mud, grass, and other materials. There was a video link with the camera that allowed Shah to see the remote image his camera was going to capture. The resulting images are interesting and beautiful. These are close-up images captured without the interference of having a human being right there to take them. The camera clicking did attract the attention of some of the animals, but many ignored the camera or ran right by it.

This is not a text heavy book, but each image has a caption about the animals pictured and how they survive on the Serengeti. There are images of elephants, baboons, cheetahs, gazelle, hyenas, and lions, to name a few. There are images of animals eating, playing, checking out the camera, fighting, stampeding, and more. It’s an up close view most of us will never get of some gorgeous wildlife and well worth a look through.

Superman and the Men of Steel by Grant Morrison

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Susan

Have you ever wanted to read the Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, or Green Lantern comics but didn’t know where to start? Well right now is a good time to jump into reading a number of comics, all labelled The New 52, which are part of a large reset DC Comics did of its superhero comics (basically this means they all started over again at issue 1).

Superman and the Men of Steel is part of that reset, and Superman is going back to his roots. The invincible Superman of recent years is back to being a man who can be hurt when hit by a bullet train. He bounces back from being shocked in an electric chair, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. Without disregarding everything that came before, Grant Morrison and Rags Morales have taken the Man of Steel and started retelling his story for a new generation.

In this graphic novel, Superman has to save Earth from the beings who destroyed his home planet of Krypton. Lois Lane is doing her best to get the story, Lex Luthor is looking out for himself, and Superman is viewed with suspicion by the masses as a mysterious alien of unknown origins.

Dancers Among Us by Jordan Matter

Posted on December 15, 2012 by Susan

Dancers Among Us by Jordan Matter is subtitled “A Celebration of Joy in the Everyday” and it’s a very fitting subtitle. The book is a collection of photographs interspersed with just six very short illustrative stories by Matter about the subjects of dreaming, loving, playing, exploring, grieving, working, and living. The stories are just one to two pages long, leaving the emphasis on the dancers and the beautiful photographs that capture them in action.

What these dancers can do with their bodies is simply amazing. Some of them appear to be levitating. Some are perched precariously from high places. Others are jumping in the rain or snow, and still others are posed in ways that my body certainly does not bend to demonstrate extreme emotions like shame, grief, love, and joy.

The photographs in this book were taken all across the US, plus a few in Canada, in places both well-known and not. The differences in scenes and weather conditions make the photos more visually interesting and lend themselves to the different types of situations and emotions Matter set out to capture.

To learn more about the project and to see videos of how some of these images were captured, go to http://www.dancersamongus.com/.

Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan

Posted on December 13, 2012 by Susan

I’ve been reading buzz about Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan for a few months now, so I decided to find out what had people so excited about this one. The book is the author’s memoir of the month when she was struck down with a very serious illness that had doctors stumped for quite some time. Her symptoms ranged from numbness to psychosis to catatonia. Cahalan actually had to use her skills as a journalist to go back after she had recovered and interview her family, friends and doctors to piece together her entire illness. She has very few memories from the time of a serious seizure right before being admitted to the hospital until awhile after her treatment and recovery started.

Perhaps the fascination with the story is that most people know serious illness can strike at any time. Cahalan’s experience is different than many because she was able to make a full recovery and relate her experience to others.

Cold Days by Jim Butcher

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Susan

I was turned onto the Dresden Files series about six or seven years ago now. Over the course of the series, Harry Dresden has been battered, burned and nearly killed so many times I’ve lost count. He’s made enemies and friends, and he’s gained knowledge and strength. Jim Butcher now has so many balls in the air with this series that even those of us who have read many of the books multiple times still have trouble recalling everything that’s happened.

In Cold Days, Harry finds himself in yet another predicament. He accepted the position of Winter Knight from the Queen of the Winter Court, Mab, because he needed the strength the position provides in Changes in a confrontation with a court of vampires. For his first task, Mab tells Harry he must kill an immortal. Harry has to gather up all his old friends to figure out why he needs to kill an immortal, how he’s going to accomplish it and where this fits in the bigger picture of everything that’s gone wrong in the world in the past books in the series.

This is not a series where a person can jump in and out. It really needs to be read in order, so if you’re interested, pick up Storm Front the next time you’re in the library.

And if you’re waiting for Cold Days or are finished and now awaiting the next Dresden Files book, try The Iron Druid Chronicles by Kevin Hearne.

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Susan

Clay Jannon needs a job. He lost his job in the the great food-chain contraction of the early twenty-first century. When he sees a “Help Wanted” sign in the window of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, he inquires inside and is hired on the spot. The front of the store is a haphazard collection of the types of books one finds in a normal used book store. But the back of the store, well, the back of the store contains the tomes that Clay has dubbed the Waybacklist. As far as Clay can tell, these books don’t exist anywhere else in the world other than in Mr. Penumbra’s store. They are filled with code, and they’re not for sale. The Waybacklist books are borrowed by a select group of odd personages who come into the store, return the last volume they borrowed and then move onto the next. When Clay starts to figure out that there’s a pattern to the volumes they borrow, he and his (rather eccentric) group of friends start using a computer model of the store and the volumes borrowed to decipher the pattern. Things only get stranger from there.

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is a story of knowledge lost, the search for the answer to eternal life, the tension between old technology and new, and the things a person can accomplish when one is willing to learn and try new things.

Daring writer’s deadline: 50,000 words or more in 30 days

Posted on November 4, 2012 by Susan

It’s November and National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is here again. If you’ve never heard of National Novel Writing Month, the goal of participants in NaNoWriMo is to put out a 50,000 word novel (about 175 pages) over the course of the month of November. If you’ve ever wanted to write a novel but have never found the time to do it, this could be the month. The emphasis isn’t on having a completely polished book by the end of the month; it’s simply to have written 50,000 words. This can mean a complete novel that needs editing and revising, or 50,000 words towards the completion of a longer novel. Broken down to a more manageable number, this sets a goal of writing around 1,667 words per day. This obviously isn’t for everyone, but for some people, having an explicit deadline can be very helpful.

NaNoWriMo is great for helping people complete their goal of writing a novel because there are so many participants. There is an online community of writers, active at http://www.nanowrimo.org/ and on Twitter and Facebook, who are going through the same worries, stress, and time crunch and who are ready and willing to offer encouragement, advice, and ideas. There are so many people participating in NaNoWriMo nationwide that many towns and cities have local participant meet-ups. Manhattan has a group on the NaNoWriMo website with over 300 registered participants.

The first NaNoWriMo took place in 1999 in the San Francisco Bay area with a group of 20 participants. The next year it grew to 140 participants, and when bloggers started spreading the word and local and national news outlets started covering the event, it really took off. Last year 256,618 people from around the world signed up to participate on the website and 36,843 completed their goals.

There are some hugely successful books that were written during NaNoWriMo. A few examples are Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, Persistence of Memory by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, and Wool by Hugh Howey. In October, Kansas author Gennifer Albin’s first novel, Crewel, written when she participated in NaNoWriMo in 2010, was published by Farrar Strauss Girous and is receiving excellent reviews. Her book is the story of Adelice, a young girl who lives in a world where women known as Spinsters weave the fabric of people’s lives.

If you’re participating in NaNoWriMo, there are a number of ways Manhattan Public Library can help you. If you need a place to work, don’t forget about the library! We’ve got computers for you to work on, and quiet spaces, outlets, and wireless internet for people who bring in their own laptops. Sometimes getting out of your house or apartment and working in a different space can help you be more productive. On second thought perhaps you would get more written if you don’t connect to our wi-fi!

If you’re experiencing a bit of writer’s block, try flipping through some of our creative writing books for exercises to get your creative juices flowing. Check out a movie or a CD to take a break, recharge and relax before you go back to writing. Look through some of our beautiful art, nature, and photography books to spark ideas. And if you need a fact for your book, stop by the reference desk and we’ll help you find information on everything from the cost of twine in 1890 America for your Western adventure to finding the perfect cookie recipe for your culinary mystery.

To learn more about National Novel Writing Month and to sign up to participate, go to http://www.nanowrimo.org

The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde

Posted on October 16, 2012 by Susan

I picked up The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde because I’ve read and liked the Thursday Next series and because the book got some great reviews. If you like Jasper Fforde’s oddball humor in his other books (or if you like Terry Pratchett), you’ll want to pick up The Last Dragonslayer.

Jennifer Strange is a foundling. She was abandoned on the steps of the convent of the Blessed Ladies of the Lobster as a baby and raised there. At 12, she was placed with Kazam Mystical Arts Management and is currently running the agency after the disappearance of its founder in a magic trick gone wrong.

Kazam is an employment agency for magicians that has fallen on hard times. Magic has been fading from the world and the magicians have grown less powerful as ambient magic has fallen. When magic starts to see a surge, strange events start to happen. The magicians with precognitive abilities all have a premonition that the last dragon will be slain in the next week. Jennifer sets off to find the Last Dragonslayer to see what she can do to prevent this from happening.

Star Trek: The Next Generation/Doctor Who: Assimilation^2

Posted on October 13, 2012 by Susan

As a huge Doctor Who fan and someone who grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, how could I possibly resist this graphic novel that combines the two? I obviously couldn’t.

The Doctor, Amy, and Rory have decided to visit somewhere cool and foggy and end up in San Francisco. When they run into an android in a bar, they realize the TARDIS has materialized inside the holodeck of the USS Enterprise and they are speaking to Data, Commander Riker, and Doctor Crusher. It doesn’t appear to be a coincidence that the Doctor is suddenly in another science fiction universe when the Cybermen show up. The Doctor tells the crew of the USS Enterprise about his dealings with the Cybermen when they realize the Borg and the Cybermen are working together to attack a planet in Delta IV.

The Doctor starts remembering flashes of something that never happened and realizes that the Cybermen have gone back and changed history. Can the Doctor convince Captain Picard that the Cybermen are just as dangerous as the Borg? Sadly, we all have to wait until January to find out.

Every Day by David Levithan

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Susan

Every morning, A wakes up in a different body. Some days A is a girl, some days a boy, sometimes white, sometimes Asian, some days fat and some days thin (although always the same age as A, which at this point is 16). A has gotten used to these changes because it’s all A has ever known. A tries not to interfere in the lives of the bodies s/he inhabits, just drifting in and out and trying to leave things the way they were and not cause damage or have the person act too far out of character.

That all changes when A wakes up in the body of a slacker named Justin. Justin has a girlfriend, Rhiannon, and A falls in love with her at first sight. Suddenly A is breaking the rules and trying to see Rhiannon even after switching bodies. Rhiannon is the first person A confides in about the way A lives. It’s the first time A has really wanted to be with the same person every day. Rhiannon and A must navigate the complexities of what A’s condition means in having a relationship. They must decide what things can be sacrificed and what things cannot.

Friends with Boys by Faith Erin Hicks

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Susan

Today is Maggie’s first day of school. Ever. For the first 14 years of her life, Maggie’s mom homeschooled her. Her only friends were her three older brothers who are there at high school to watch out for her, but it definitely isn’t the same. Lucy and her older brother, Alistair, are the only ones who have shown an interest in trying to get to know shy, quiet Maggie. They eat with her at lunch, go with her to see Alien at Halloween, and take her with them to the local Maritime Museum. That’s where Maggie finds out the back story of the ghost that has been stalking her since she was a little girl.

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo

Posted on September 28, 2012 by Susan

Ravka is a place of hardship for most. It is ravaged by wars with hostile neighbors and has been split in half by the Shadow Fold for the past few hundred years. The Fold is a dead, dark place filled with volcra, creatures that fly out of the darkness and snatch and eat the men trying to reach the ports of Ravka on the other side of the Fold. Some in Ravka, known as the Grisha, have special powers ranging from the ability to heal wounds to the ability to summon fire. The Shadow Fold itself is the result of a Grisha known as the Black Heretic’s greed and lust for power.

Alina and Mal are soldiers in the First Army who grew up together on a noble estate after being orphaned in the Border Wars and have been best friends since their shared childhood. They must cross the Fold, or Unsea, on ships made to cross the dead sand and dust. Ships powered by Grisha who can summon the wind. When their ship is beset by volcra and Alina and Mal are moments from death, Alina’s desperation makes her use a dormant power, one the people of Ravka have been waiting for since the Fold first appeared.

Alina is swept away to the palace by the Darkling, head of the Grisha, to train and learn to use her new found power. Without Mal she feels more out of place than ever, and the palace is filled with intrigue and people with hidden motivations. Who can Alina trust in this strange new world?

Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines

Posted on September 16, 2012 by Susan

Have you ever wished you could reach into a book and pull out one of the objects described? How about Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak? Excalibur? The Hope Diamond? The possibilities are nigh endless. Isaac Vainio is a libriomancer, basically a wizard who can reach into books and create the objects found within. He is also a member of Die Zwelf Portenaere (the Porters), a group who keep magic in check and train people with magical abilities. After an incident where Isaac’s magic got dangerously out of control, Isaac is now a cataloger working at a small library in Michigan and not allowed to use his magic, except in order to defend himself.

When three Sanguinarius Meyerii (Twilight-style vampires) show up at his library and try to kill him, Isaac is drawn back into the world of magic and a conflict between the Porters and the vampires.

The creator of libriomancy, Gutenberg, is missing. And the vampires believe he is behind the attacks that have been perpetrated against their kind. If Gutenberg isn’t found and the attacks stopped, it means all-out war between the vampires and the Porters and the possibility that the mundane world will find out about magic. The Porters are doing their best to contain the conflict with the vampires, but they don’t have anyone left to send after Gutenberg. Isaac, his fire spider, and a dryad named Lena Greenwood are the only ones left who can find Gutenberg and prevent a war.

This is a great book for any bibliophile, particularly ones who enjoy science fiction and fantasy.

Little Apple Bookworm

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