2016 Library Challenge: An Author with Your Initials (S. E. Hinton)

The author with your initials challenge took me an embarrassing amount of time to find a book for. None of the authors with my initials seemed particularly interesting to me, until a few weeks ago when Mynette told me I really needed to read S. E. Hinton’s classic coming-of-age story, The Outsiders. In addition to being intrigued by her recommendation, I also realized that Hinton shares my first and middle initials. In the weeks since then, the book has come up a couple of times with other people, and whenever I would admit to never having read it, the response was always a confused “You’ve never read The Outsiders?”

Having finally read The Outsiders, I now understand everyone’s reaction. I’m actually  embarrassed that I hadn’t read it before.

2016 Library Challenge: A Book By An Author Under 30

I had trouble picking books for this challenge because I kept second-guessing how the instructions define “an author under 30.” Are we talking about someone under 30 now? Or does it just mean someone who was under 30 when their book was published? Or maybe under 30 when it was written? It’s a veritable wormhole!

Anyway, I’ve decided to just include a sampler of books from people who are still under 30 and also those from people who are now in their 30s but were under 30 when the book was published.

Incidentally, in much the same way I realized that books over 500 pages tend to come from a couple of different genres, I realized that a lot of these authors write either speculative fiction or historical fiction. Make of that what you will.

As always, if you’re interested in learning more about one of the books, just follow the link to our online catalog.

2016 Books in Bloom Recap

Thanks to everyone who joined us recently at this year’s Books in Bloom Festival!

This year was actually my first time attending, and I’m already looking forward to going back next year!

So many of the author sessions looked interesting that it was hard to pick which presentations to attend. Ultimately, I decided to attend one for an author whose work I haven’t read yet and one from an author whose book I did read recently.

2016 Library Challenge: A Book By Your Favorite Author

VARIOUS…Mandatory Credit: Photo by Everett Collection / Rex Features ( 778826a ) Arthur Miller (1915-2005) American playwright won the Pulitzer Prize for DEATH OF A SALESMAN (1948). VARIOUS

FOSSUM

If I asked you who your favorite author is, what would your answer be? Quick! Don’t stop and think about this question too hard.

Was it easy for you to come up with an answer or did you struggle to pick just one favorite author?

Books in Bloom Preview–Crime Time

Here at the Berryville Library we’re looking forward to the 11th annual Books in Bloom Literary Festival on May 15th. You’ll get to mingle with famous authors and fellow book lovers. To prepare for Books in Bloom, we’ll be running teasers about the authors who will be giving talks.  We also have works by all of this year’s Books in Bloom authors on display at the library. Read them now–meet them on the 15th!

Do you like true crime? Mysteries? Suspense thrillers? If so, you’re in luck because Books in Blooms will be featuring a few authors who publish in those genres. If you’ve read the blog for any length of time, you know that I really enjoy crime fiction, and I’m really looking forward to attending some of these sessions. We might run into each other!

Ask the Blogger: What Would You Ask A Writer

One of the questions submitted to me for this series was “What 3 questions would you ask an author?” by Kris. (Thanks, Kris!)

I had to really think about this one because the one time I did get a chance to talk to an author–at a writing conference I attended in college, I got to meet Ron Hansen, who wrote one of my all-time favorite books, The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward R0bert Ford–I couldn’t think of any intelligent questions. I just mumbled something about being a big fan and then brandished my own personal copy of one of his books for an autograph. Because I’m smooth like that.

2016 Library Challenge: An Author You’ve Never Read Before (Brooks Blevins)

We’ve been talking about the upcoming Books in Bloom Festival the past couple of weeks. As part of my preparation for attending, I started reading a book that will be the subject of one of the featured talks–Brooks Blevins’s Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South.

This books tells the strange story of Connie Francis, a drifter who was murdered in Stone County, Arkansas, in the spring of 1929 by several local men. That anecdote in and of itself doesn’t really stand out in the annals of true crime, but the fact that several months later Francis testified at his own murder trial does. (No, you didn’t read that wrong. The murder victim testified at his killers’ trial.)

Intrigued?

Books in Bloom Preview–Author Tips

Here at the Berryville Library we’re looking forward to the 11th annual Books in Bloom Literary Festival on May 15th. You’ll get to mingle with famous authors and fellow book lovers. To prepare for Books in Bloom, we’ll be running teasers about the authors who will be giving talks.  We also have works by all of this year’s Books in Bloom authors on display at the library. Read them now–meet them on the 15th!

Do you like to write in your spare time? Have you ever dreamed of making your living as an author? If so, you’ll really enjoy attending the Books in Blooms talks where writers will be discussing the creative and business side of their craft.

2016 Library Challenge: An Author’s First Book

For the month of May, we’re going to be focusing on authors–we’ll be looking at the various author-specific challenges from the 2016 Library Challenge, we’re highlighting authors who’ll be at Books in Bloom later this month, and we even have a display set up at the front of the library to spotlight author’s first novels. So, it only makes sense for us to kick off our focus on authors with a post about reading an author’s first book. I must confess, while I was researching this post, I was really startled to learn some of these books were these authors’ debuts because they already possess such polish.

As always, if you’re interested in any of the books featured in the post, you can learn more about them on our online library catalog.