Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Mary Roach! My Favorite!

What I am reading next:





From Amazon.com:

The irresistible, ever-curious, and always best-selling Mary Roach returns with a new adventure to the invisible realm we carry around inside.
“America’s funniest science writer” (Washington Post) takes us down the hatch on an unforgettable tour. The alimentary canal is classic Mary Roach terrain: the questions explored in Gulp are as taboo, in their way, as the cadavers in Stiff and every bit as surreal as the universe of zero gravity explored in Packing for Mars. Why is crunchy food so appealing? Why is it so hard to find words for flavors and smells? Why doesn’t the stomach digest itself? How much can you eat before your stomach bursts? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? In Gulp we meet scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks of—or has the courage to ask. We go on location to a pet-food taste-test lab, a fecal transplant, and into a live stomach to observe the fate of a meal. With Roach at our side, we travel the world, meeting murderers and mad scientists, Eskimos and exorcists (who have occasionally administered holy water rectally), rabbis and terrorists—who, it turns out, for practical reasons do not conceal bombs in their digestive tracts. Like all of Roach’s books, Gulp is as much about human beings as it is about human bodies.

Monday, March 18, 2013

What's a Good Book to Read?

Two of the five laws of library science are that there is a book for every reader, and a reader for every book. Our job is to match up books to readers. Here are a few tools which can help:

www.Cozy-Mysteries.com

----Intelligent mysteries, often involving amateur sleuths, without graphic violence, profanity or sex. This is a HUGE genre.

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books 
----Romances are another giant category, and this site will help you find titles that are won't insult your intelligence.

Book Jam
----Two Vermont book lovers blogging about the books they are reading.

GoodReads
----This is a social networking website for readers. To use it, you create a profile, list books that you have read and liked, and the site will make recommendations for you. You can also write your own reviews, join discussions on particular books, and connect with friends to see what they are reading.

What's Next?
----Let's say you heard about an author who has written a series of books, and you want to find out what the first one is, or you've read one or more and want to find out what the next one is. Here's the site which will tell you.