Super Librarian at the NJLA Conference

Well, not Super Librarian, but her creators, were at the NJ State Library booth at the New Jersey Library Association annual meeting in Long Branch, NJ. last week. For more information on Super Librarian and her backstory, go to Super Librarian's website. The Berkeley Heights Public Library will be hosting a Free Comic Book Day on May 5.

Masha Hamilton author of The Camel Bookmobile speaks at NJLA

Masha Hamilton, author of the Camel Bookmobile, spoke at the New Jersey Library Association's annual meeting in Long Branch, New Jersey yesterday. If you are interested in her Camel Book Drive that donates books to Africa, visit the website and read the letter from Mr.Farah, the Camel Bookmobile librarian.

We Are All Hokies

Poet and Virginia Tech professor Nikki Giovanni spoke at the memorial service for the slain students. The Sun Herald reports:
"The service ended on an upbeat tone, as professor and poet Nikki Giovanni stirred her listeners' spirits with a poem.
"We are sad today and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on. We are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech. We are strong enough to stand tall fearlessly, we are brave enough to bend and cry, and sad enough to know we must laugh again," Giovanni told the audience.
"We will prevail! We will prevail! We will prevail! We are Virginia Tech!" Giovanni said, to thunderous applause.
At the football stadium, her words inspired a standing ovation. Students cheered and clapped, then started a football chant from better days. Fists rose into the air. In time the chant sounded in both the basketball arena and the stadium: "Let's go, Hokies! Let's go!" "

Here are links to this news story:
The Washington Post
Virginia Tech website memorial
Tragedy at Virginia Tech from the University Website

Pulitzer Prizes announced

The 2007 Pulitzer Prizes were announced. The Pulitzer Prize website lists the prizes for literature as follows:

FICTION
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Alfred A. Knopf)
DRAMA
Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire
HISTORY
The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff (Alfred A. Knopf)
BIOGRAPHY
The Most Famous Man in America by Debby Applegate (Doubleday)
POETRY
Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey (Houghton Mifflin)
GENERAL NONFICTION
The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright (Alfred A. Knopf)

Top April Fool's Day Hoaxes

The Museum of Hoaxes has a list of April Fool's Day hoaxes. Number one is:
"The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest. In 1957 the respected BBC news show Panorama announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Huge numbers of viewers were taken in, and many called up wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. To this question, the BBC diplomatically replied that they should "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best."

This has nothing to do with books, so in order to tie this in with this blog's literary theme, I searched for book hoaxes. Follow this link to a CBC article about book hoaxes through history and this article from the Guardian about the Top Ten Literary Hoaxes.

New Book Blogs from Newspaper Book Sections

Critical Mass book review blogs alerts us to new book review blogs coming out of the book review sections of the Dallas Morning News and the Philadelphia Inquirer.