Featuring suggestions from our annual Leisure Reading List.
Results tagged “Leisure Reading” from Iwasaki Library Blog
Happy National Library Week! Here are some ways to celebrate:
Leisure Reading List
Check out suggestions from students, faculty and staff on display throughout the Library and on the Library's website.
READ Posters
View a special edition of the Library's READ posters. Each poster features a student and a recommended library resource related to his or her major. Students were selected by the Library Committee.
Fine Amnesty
Return overdue circulating books and have up to $5 of late fines waived upon request. This offer is valid for circulating books returned during 4/12/2009 - 4/18/2009.
Movies
Watch a movie featuring librarians or libraries from our Media Collection. Stop by the Media Desk for recommendations.
Chocolate
Visit the Reference Desk and enjoy free chocolate while librarians help you find the information you need.
The 2009 Leisure Reading List is now available, with reading suggestions on display throughout the Library and on the Library website.
Thank you to all the students, faculty and staff who contributed reading recommendations to this list!
Interested in seeing some of the most frequently recommended authors and titles? Check out the following visualization:
We recently received a new book called Translating Hollywood: The World of Movie Posters, which is all about how movie posters get different treatments in different countries. The example here shows the American and Polish versions of the Midnight Cowboy poster from 1969. Because the U.S. focuses on the star-system, it shows Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight looking all fancy and rugged on the street corner, while the Polish version "perfectly encapsulates the lust-filled, androgynous sin that was late 60s New York." Personally, I like the Polish movie posters the best because they became a direct response to the post-WWII government. Basically the government controlled culture (arts), though somehow the movie poster (along with theatre posters) were given some creative freedom, resulting in the best movie posters you've ever seen. I learned that from another book called A Century of Movie Posters: From Silent to Art House. This book has way more information about movie posters from around the world, but it doesn't provide side-by-side comparison like Translating Hollywood does. Another book to definitely check out is Art of the Modern Movie Poster. This book is huge, colorful, and pretty much all-around awesome. I suggest taking a look at these books for the different worldviews, great design, and pretty pictures. Also, if you head back to the PN1995.9.P5 section, you'll find a bunch more books about movie posters.
You didn't really think the election would go completely unnoticed by the library, did you? Of course not. I will however, start with a small disclaimer. I speak only for myself and not for the Emerson library staff, and I say this in hopes that neither they nor any readers will be offended. I realize I should probably not be worried about offending anyone, but that's the nature of politics. That being said, why would I even think to write about Obama here in the first place? Because, of course, he's a writer. Obama has written two books, Dreams from My Father, and The Audacity of Hope. I've not read The Audacity of Hope, and I have only listened to the audiobook of Dreams, and I can safely say that regardless of political affiliation, it is a well written story about the formation of a captivating individual. Of Audacity, Michael Chabon says, "I found that it gave voice to a feeling about America and its history (and by implication its future) that I had always struggled myself to put into words." High praise from a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist. And why is it important that a writer will move into the White House? Again I turn to Chabon:
Ultimately words were all we had; that writing and oratory, argument and persuasion, were the root of democracy; that words can kill, or save us; something along those lines. "You can only say what you can first imagine," as I heard Tobias Wolff (the short-story master, not the Obama campaign adviser) explain to a group of people at an Obama fund-raiser. It was a mark of Obama's fitness to lead, to me at least, that he possessed sufficient natural reserves of imagination to kick oratorical ass.
These quotes come from Chabon's essay in the New York Review of Books following the Democratic National Convention. To read its entirety, which I recommend, check it out here, or you can find it on our periodicals shelves.
Well, my library colleagues have requested that I do a post about websites that I think are pretty freakin' sweet. Why you ask? Well, I'm not sure if you know this about the library staff, but we're all a bunch of nerds. Here's a short list of websites that I think are neato:
Sorted Books: Artist Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Books project involves arranging books on shelves to create sentences, poems, or just funny phrases.
Big Picture: Boston.com's Big Picture is just that, a bunch of high-resolution, beautiful photographs, emphasizing photojournalism. As the site says: "News stories in photographs." Updated daily.
Shorpy: The 100 year-old photo blog. Every picture reveals a little something about life in American in them olden' days. Oh yeah, and every single picture is amazing.
Vintagraph: I think this site is brought to you by the same people as Shorpy, but this time the focus is on historic American posters.
ArtStor: Available through Emerson's library databases. You can check out and search all sorts of pictures.
Now why would you need any of this? Like I said before, it's fun! Who doesn't like pretty pictures? But also, things like posters from WWI or advertisements from the 50s can say a lot about the visual communication and values from those times.
Hooray the library is open again! Since people will be trickling in and out, I'm going to go ahead and give you another book recommendation. This time, it's The Complete Essays of Mark Twain. Why should you read this? Because Mark Twain was funny, witty, clever, wore spectacularly dapper white suits, had a killer 'stache, and because without him, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert don't have jobs.
Books from the annual Suggestions for Leisure Reading, a list of recommendations from Emerson College faculty and staff, are on display in the President's Room of the Library. You can also browse this display through our flickr page to see book titles and availability.
Happy National Library Week! Here are some ways to celebrate:
Recommend a book to your fellow students and view suggestions on display throughout the Library. And check out the 2008 Leisure Reading List, featuring books recommended by faculty and staff.
Return overdue circulating books and have up to $5 of late fines waived upon request. This offer is valid for circulating books returned during 4/13/2008 - 4/19/2008.
Visit the Reference Desk and enjoy free candy while learning about Library collections and services.