Borrow DVDs from Your Public Library

Borrowing DVDs at Your Public Library - our new ratings system

Can  you believe it? A new year is just hours away with all the hope and anticipation new beginnings promise. At Berkeley Heights Public Library, we are starting 2015 with a few changes that will make borrowing DVDs easier for our library users.  DVD boxes will now have visible rating stickers to help distinguish G, PG, PG-13 and R films.  We are making these changes to assist parents and caregivers in choosing appropriate viewing materials, but remember that these ratings are subjective and not intended to endorse, limit or restrict use.  Many animated PG films will be moved to the row of children’s DVDs - who knew so many animated films geared to family viewing have PG ratings?  In deciding which films to move, I have been reading reviews and ratings on several websites.  The following have been most helpful:  Kids-in-mind movie ratings; Common Sense Media; Dove; Parent Previews; and Is This Movie Suitable.  I check so many reviews because of the range of opinions and the variety of criteria used to rate movies.

The staff is also changing the loan period of TV series which have multiple discs.  These titles will circulate for 14 days, up from 7 days.  Now it will be easier to watch an entire season of Downton Abbey or Longmire without binge viewing.  Please be patient, this transition will be gradual until we capture every series/season. 

To all our library patrons:  Enjoy a Happy and Healthy New Year filled with interesting films - borrowed for free from your local library, of course!

The Berkeley Heights Public Library

- S. Bakos

In a Dry Season

If you like the PBS television show 'DCI Banks,' read the series it is based on by Peter Robinson. 'In a Dry Season' is the tenth in the series and the first I've read. Alan Banks has been relegated to boring desk jobs for insubordination and is assigned to a cold case when a skeleton is found in an abandoned village which is revealed when the summer drought dries up the reservoir that had covered the town for fifty years. The book alternates between the story of the village during WWII and the current investigation into what appears to have been an unreported murder there. This book is a great depiction of the deprivations and tragedies of WWII in the U.K., interwoven with a believable present-day police procedural. The suspense lasts until the last chapter.
Recommended for fans of Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie series and Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley series.

If You Like Downton Abbey, read this

If you are addicted to the PBS series 'Downton Abbey', you should read Kate Morton's  The House at Riverton, the story of a grand English manor house told in flashbacks by a 98 year former housemaid recalling her service at Riverton from 1914 to 1924. The story of the house, the aristocratic family and the downstairs staff mirrors the changes in English society during that time. From pre-World War I privilege to the carnage of the Great War and the gradual disappearance of 'in-service' jobs, the story has a mysterious death at Riverton at it's heart.
Recommended for fans of family sagas, all things British, before the wars romance and historical fiction.

I also loved Kate Morton's The Forgotten Garden and the author's The Distant Hours is on my 'must read' list. The Forgotten Garden traces a long-held family secret from Australia to Cornwall, from early 20th century to the present day and involves a beautiful book of fairy tales. I have recommended Ms. Morton's books to readers who like family sagas, gothic stories like Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca, and who like the complex plots of Kate Atkinson. The library has the cult of Kates going on with the staff because both Kate Atkinson and Kate Morton are very popular and have allowed the staff to make great reading recommendations to our patrons.

Kate Morton's new book, the Secret Keeper will be released October 16, 2012 and is on order at the library so patrons can now put holds on that book.

Lost Books on Display

The beginning of the month rolled around and BHPL's book display was due for a change. One of my colleagues said to me, "Why don't you do a display of all the lost books?" The book display shelves were sitting empty, so I thought that she meant all of the library books patrons end up paying for because they can't find them at home. Ha ha.

Then it turned out that she meant Lost as in the TV show about the survivors of a plane crash who live on a mysterious tropical island. Oops. If you watch Lost, you can quit reading here because you already obviously know that the episodes' titles refer to books, that their plots reference books (Lord of the Flies or Watership Down, anyone?). Or that there's a book club and a lot of reading done on the beach.

You can see a list of the books and their connections to the show here. It's a pretty decent list of books, with a lot of classics that you probably read in school, with a dash of bestsellers like Stephen King, Michael Crichton and Tim LaHaye. The L.A. Times talked with the show's writers about the books that have influenced them the most.

Next month's display: books seen on Mad Men. Just kidding. (Unless someone I work with is a fan, in which case it's a distinct possibility).

Funny in Farsi

Funny in Farsi, a memoir of growing up Iranian in America by Firoozeh Dumas (2004) is a small book at only 198 pages, which is on the Governor Livingston High School summer reading list. I have recommended it many times to desperate students in late August and finally decided to read it myself. I'm glad I did. I can now recommend this warm-hearted account of the author's family and their experience as immigrants in 1970's U.S. where most Americans could not even find Iran on a map. Ms. Dumas comes across as a delightful person with a natural wit. The book is now being made into an ABC television series, so you should read it now before the show airs and either ruins the book or creates great demand for it.

Recommended highly for middle school age through adult.

Stephen Fry in America Makes Mistakes

Stephen Fry is an English actor, perhaps best known in the U.S. as Jeeves in the Jeeves and Wooster BBC/Masterpiece Theatre television adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse's series of comic novels. Mr. Fry, who claims to be a lifelong fan of the United States and of all of our quaint colonial ways, filmed a television series, Stephen Fry in America, which aired in the U.K. in 2008, but has not yet been broadcast in the U.S. The accompanying book, Stephen Fry in America, fifty states and the man who set out to see them all, was released in November 2009 in the U.S. In the book's Introduction, the author distances himself from Britons who sneer at
"American ignorance...crassness...isolationism...materialism...and vulgarity," (p.2).
Furthermore, Mr. Fry continues, the "broad general knowledge" which his countrymen feel they possess in spades, as Bertie Wooster would say, is no reason to be all snooty about us poor, pitiful colonials. Well, shucks, Steve, thanks and right back atchoo! Much of the book takes a simlar tone of being a back-handed compliment: Mr. Fry loves those salt-of-the-earth New York hunters, but please don't shoot any deer while he's filming you.
Ironically, "broad general knowledge" or even the ability to fact-check and proofread, seem to be qualities sorely missing in this travelogue, which is actually as much of an ego trip as a road trip for Mr. Fry. A casual reading revealed the following errors which an average American fourth grader would have noticed without straining a muscle. An Actual Editor might have found more mistakes, but you get the idea.

Grant's Tomb is in Washington, D.C. (p. 78) No, it's in NYC and three guesses who is buried there.

N.J. has a town called Brunswick (p. 61) Really, is that where New Rutgers is? Oh, I'm sorry, we colonials are incapable of irony (p. 2.)

George Washington crossed the Delaware from N.J. to PA to invade Trenton (p. 66, in the State of Delaware chapter, don't ask) OK, that would be a difficult military maneuver, even if it was just to defeat a bunch of drunken Brits carousing in the Trenton saloons on Christmas Day.

OTB refers to "on track betting" in New York and is the only legal kind of betting in America (p. 58) OTB refers to "off track betting."

Submarines are named after state capitals, (p. 46) Would that be like the (submarine) Nautilus, named after the capitol of ...? Oh, wait, there is no capitol city named Nautilus.

The Mississippi River flows from Chicago to New Orleans. Stephen, why do you find rivers so confusing?

Architect of the St. Louis arch, Eero Saarinen is referred to as Danish. He is Finnish, as any Finnish school child can tell you, and which I, barely literate Yankee that I am, know off the top of my head.

Excuse me for not having the page numbers for the last 2 errors. For a while I was writing mistakes on Post-it notes as I read, but my supply dwindled rapidly.

Fans of Stephen Fry will enjoy this book, but otherwise, give this book a fact-check-fail.

Shark Week on TV

The Discovery Channel's Shark Week, started last night and continues through Friday. Last night's Blood in the Water covered the shark attacks in New Jersey during the summer of 1916 which were the basis for the book and movie Jaws by Peter Benchley. The Shark Guide on the Discovery Channel's website has pictures and information on different kinds of sharks, links to shark news and accounts of shark attacks, shark myths and also shark videos.

For shark information at the Berkeley Heights Public Library, browse in Dewey # 597.3 upstairs and in the Juvenile Department.

Recommended Reading:

Jaws by Peter Benchley was a great summer read, a real page turner for the beach. Recommended for teens and adults.

In 2001 two books came out about the 1916 NJ shark attacks.

Close to Shore, a true story of terror in an age of innocence by Michael Capuzzo, which read like a novel and also told about the increasing popularity of the Jersey Shore tourism for the middle class. It's almost like the shark KNEW there were more tourists in the water. Nom nom nom. Yikes! At the time, scientists did not realize that sharks, other than the Great White, attack humans so the shark attacks were a horrible surprise and something of a mystery.

Twelve Days of Terror, a definitive investigation of the 1916 New Jersey shark attacks by Richard G. Fernicola, MD.

I can personally recommend Mr. Capuzzo's book, one of the few non-fiction books I read that year, and Dr. Fernicola's also got good reviews and is checked out as I write this post. Parents: if you are looking for books that will interest your teen, try these gory stories of real shark attacks. Teens will eat them up.

Photo of Great White Shark from Discovery Channel website.

What's On TV Tonight?

In my house we have a nightly ritual called, "What's on TV tonight?" One of us reads the TV listings carefully and then announces something not-so-original like, "hundreds of channels and nothing worth watching!"
If you are looking for good TV programs, FREE, whenever it's convenient for you to watch, try My Librarydv, available from the BHPL website "Remote Databases." A quick browse of available videos revealed:
The Little Princess starring Shirley Temple
The Little Shop of Horrors with Jack Nicholson
The TV shows: Antiques Road Show and Today's Homeowner
Guitar Lessons
For children: Boohbah and Caillou.

The Minister's Sermon in the Witches of Eastwick

At the Unitarian Church in Eastwick, RI, Brenda, the minister, denounces the witches of Eastwick, sounding to me like Harold Hill in The Music Man saying there is "trouble right here in River City!" There is something satirical about the scene, although the author may not have been parodying Harold Hill specifically.

"There is evil in the world and there is evil in this town," she pronounced ringingly..." (p 269) She continues for several pages along these lines, working herself up from high dudgeon to higher dudgeon, to coin a phrase.
Referring to the town's coven of three witches,
"Their jealouthy hath poithened uth all --" Brenda bent her head, and her mouth gave birth to an especially vivid, furry, foul-tasting monarch butterfly, its orange wings rimmed thickly in black, its flickering casual and indolent beneath the white-painted rafters." (p.272)

Not just vitriol and indignance, but actual bugs fly out of her mouth. Witchcraft at work? Reminiscent of the spell cast upon the sisters in the fairy tale that caused the good sister to utter words adorned with pearl and precious stones and the bad one to spew forth toads and lizards when speaking.

As Margaret Atwood pointed out in her review of the book (NYT, May 13, 1984 - available from the library's NYT database)
"These are not 1980's Womanpower witches. They aren't at all interested in healing the earth, communing with the Great Goddess, or gaining Power-within... These are bad Witches... and go in for sabbats, sticking pins in wax images, Kissing the Devil's backside..." and more activities not suitable for discussing in this family-friendly blog.
Mr. Updike said in an interview with Andrea Stevens about the book ("A Triple Spell" NYT, May 13, 1984)
"I've been criticized for making the women in my books subsidiary to the men. It was true enough. Perhaps my female characters have been too domestic, too adorable and too much what men wished them to be."
This is not a problem in the Witches of Eastwick. These women are not subservient, not adorable or domestic, but did the author have to go to the extreme of describing witches to find more powerful women for his fiction?
The Witches of Eastwick is a tour-de-force of a master wordsmith at work, it's funny, sly, satirical and it gives a weirdly skewed vision of American suburbia in the 1960's. It will be interesting to find out who in the book group liked the book and who did not and why.

PS: In 2009, ABC started a television series, Eastwick, based on this book. For a description of the series, try tv.com.

Witches of Eastwick

The Tuesday night and Friday morning library book groups are meeting in one grand mashup session this Friday at 10:30 a.m. to discuss John Updike's the Witches of Eastwick. Many people remember the 1987 film version directed by George Miller (Mad Max etc) starring Cher as Alexandra the witch and with Jack Nicholson chewing the scenery and leering as the devilish new neighbor in the small Rhode Island town infested, or infected, by witches. The Internet Movie Database offers pictures, a cast list and a trailer to watch.

Mr. Updike wrote Witches in 1984 and the story takes place in one year in the late 1960's, using the Viet Nam War, the feminist and hippie movements as background for this story of witches causing trouble again in New England, a subject that had long interested the author.

So far, I have found the book hard going because Updike's style is highly descriptive. The metaphors and similes and symbols and abundant adjectives slow down the pace of reading. For readers who enjoy his sly, satirical style, the book would be a feast to be savored. For me, not so much, but that's just a personal preference. However it seems that critics do divide into two big sides on the Updike issue. The pro-Updike revere him as a great American novelist, the best chronicler of 20th century American life in the suburbs and a superb stylist. The not-so-enthused critics find that very florid style is used to describe essentially - nothing. Everyone agrees that the author writes about sex a lot and that can't have hurt his popularity.

Illustration: Albrecht Durer's copper engraving of Four Witches (1497) from the novel's cover.

To be continued in tomorrow's post.

Postscript: ABC started a television series, Eastwick,which is loosely based on the book, the Witches of Eastwick. This has caused many Google searches to lead people to this series of blog posts about the library book group discussion of John Updike's book. I haven't watched the series or seen the movie, but the book is worth reading, so go to your local library and give it a try. 10/06/2009