Somerville Public Library Blog

There will be no public internet access at the Central library on Monday 2/2, due to some work being done by Minuteman. We apologize for the inconvenience!

Satisfy your sweet tooth with a good book.

Bitter Chocolate: the Dark Side of the World’s Most Seductive Sweet

The Chocolate Lovers’ Club

Better than Chocolate

Obsession, Deceit, and Really Dark Chocolate

Chocolate & Vanilla

The Chocolate War

Like Water for Chocolate

All three library locations are open today. If you go out, just drive carefully and be aware that the snow emergency parking rules are in effect. In fact, here is a great audio clip of Tom Champion’s message set to music. Enjoy!

This Wednesday the Somerville Public Library will be showing the cult classic The Big Lebowski. For those of you who somehow missed it, this 1998 Coen brothers comedy stars Jeff Bridges as unemployed slacker Jeffrey Lebowski, aka “The Dude,” who is mistaken for a multimillionaire with the same name. He is commissioned to deliver a ransom for the release of the other Lebowski’s kidnapped trophy wife. Nothing goes as planned, and hilarity ensues. The cast also features John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Julianne Moore. Though not a commercial success when it was first released, the movie has come to be considered the first cult film of the Internet era.

Date: Wed. Jan. 28

Time: 6:30pm

Place: Library auditorium

(Bathrobes and bowling shoes not required.)

For some fun in the meantime, check out the Rolling Stone article “Decade of the Dude,” take this quiz to find out which Big Lebowski character you are, or play with the Big Lebowski random quote generator.

HyperHistory Online is a useful website that also happens to be a lot of fun.  I’ll try to describe it, but I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to communicate why it’s so fascinating and addictive, so you should check it out for yourself.

To quote from their own blurb, “HyperHistory is an expanding scientific project presenting 3,000 years of world history with an interactive combination of synchronoptic lifelines, timelines, and maps.”  The key word there is ”synchronoptic,” meaning seeing at the same time.  HyperHistory Online allows one to see at a glance not only what was happening simultaneously in different parts of the world, but also what was going on at the same time in different disciplines such as politics, the arts, religion, and science.

If that sounds dry, it’s not.  The juxtapositions revealed are often intriguing.  For example, in the second half of the 19th century Abraham Lincoln, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and Thomas Edison were all going about their business, Emily Brontë was writing Wuthering Heights at the same time that Mormons were founding Salt Lake City, and the end of the U. S. Civil War coincided with the publication of Alice in Wonderland. Pick a different time period - say the early part of the 13th century - and discover that Genghis Khan was expanding his empire at the same time that Icelandic poet Snorri Sturluson was working on his Prose Edda and sagas of the kings of Norway.  In the late 1400s, Christopher Columbus, Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Martin Luther were all alive and stirring things up in various ways.

HyperHistory also has maps that shed light on such topics as the Mayan, Aztec, and Incan empires, the Jewish Diaspora, Viking journeys to the new world, and the European and Pacific theaters of World War II.  It has specialized lifelines for famous composers and scientists, information on prehistory (the Big Bang, human evolution, the development of writing, etc.) and many, many links to websites offering detailed information on hundreds of topics.  Have a look!

The eyes of the world were on Washington, DC today. If the coverage made you curious about the nation’s capital, come over to the library and check out some books.   Georgetown Ladies’ Social Club is a behind-the-scenes look at the informal power structure in Washington, a book that shows the parties and relationships that sometimes made or broke careers–or made history. If you want to know how the city got its start, read  Washington Burning: How a Frenchman’s Vision of Our Nation’s Capital Survived Congress, the Founding Fathers, and the Invading British Army (the title pretty much says it all).  If you would rather read fiction, you can’t do better than Christopher Buckley, who writes scathing satires about life inside the Beltway. Try No  Way to Treat a First Lady or Thank You For Smoking.

While you’re waiting for your turn on the lengthy request lists for  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, why not take a moment to get to know the author a little better?

Start with his delightful interview with Stephen Colbert, then go on to hear him speak at the Sydney Writer’s Festival. And read on as he talks about his family,  life as a writer, and what his public library meant to him when he was a kid.

“My biggest challenge and the part of the job I love the most are the same: letting the reader feel what it’s like to be someone they otherwise might never think of.”          - Stewart O’Nan, in an interview.

This is where O’Nan truly excels, including such vivid detail in the daily lives of his characters that the reader truly feels they have slipped into another person’s life. His short novel Last Night at the Lobster is so rich with this kind of description you can almost smell the combination of fried seafood and vinyl booths, and hear the clinking of silverware thrown into bus bins. We follow the main character’s every move throughout his entire shift on the restaurant’s last night of business before closing for good, and it almost feels too real to be fiction.

In The Good Wife, a woman waits for years as her husband serves out his sentence for a murder she is convinced he did not commit. The passage of time and interminable feeling of waiting is palpable as we share the daily realities of her small, focused life.

O’Nan’s newest novel, Songs for the Missing, is in many ways a larger story than those above, but shares their attention to detail. When an 18-year-old girl goes missing, her family launches a search, feeling that the authorities aren’t doing enough. They are forced to go on with their lives, while still carrying around flyers to post, updating their website, and continuing to hope she’ll be found.

These are just his few most recent books, but he has plenty more fiction and even some non-fiction. If you haven’t read anything by Stewart O’Nan, this winter is the perfect time to start!

David Pogue has a short piece in today’s New York Times on saving money on personal technology. Start reading here to find out how to cut costs on cable TV, cell phones, pcs and more!

A wonderful writer died this week: the British historian Christopher Hibbert. Talented, prolific and versatile, he wrote about subjects ranging from the house of Medici to the American Revolution to  nineteenth-century India. His books were always thoroughly researched, finely written and un-put-downable. He was one of my favorite authors when I was a teenager, and to this day I still find his books utterly absorbing.

SPL has quite a few of Hibbert’s titles that illustrate the breadth of his writing.  If you’re interested in Italy, check out his Florence: the Biography of A City; to sample his talents as a biographer you could read The Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I, the Genius of the Golden Age or Wellington: A Personal History.  If you’re curious about the other Civil War (theirs, not ours) you would do well to read Cavaliers and Roundheads: the English Civil War, 1642-1649. And if you have any interest in how the American Revolution looked from the other side, put down 1776 and pick up Redcoats and Rebels.