Google has announced the launch of Street View in Australia - a feature that shows what an area looks like at street level. This has involved the use of a van driving down the many byways of our nation, with special cameras on board, showing front, back and both side views. A lot of our major cities have been covered, but there is still much more to do.

You can look up your home and maybe even your workplace from Google Maps and if this feature is available, the street will be hightlighted in blue outline and when you click on the Street View link a pop-up opens with the image. You can move up and down the street, or side to side by clicking on the appropriate arrows.

We have linked to the Google Street View images for most of our libraries, to enable you to see what they look like from the street. The only branch not able to be seen is Narre Warren as the photography van didn’t venture into the Fountain Gate precinct. Linked to our Google Maps directions, it makes it even easier to find your local library. So why not do that, then come down and check out our great collections, services and facilities.

Michelle

The Prime Minister’s Literary Award nominees have been announced and they are:

FICTION:

Burning in by Mireille Juchau

El Dorado by Dorothy Porter

Jamaica by Malcolm Knox

Sorry by Gail Jones

The complete stories by David Malouf

The widow and her hero by Tom Keneally

The zookeeper’s war by Steven Conte

Judges for the fiction category are Professor Peter Pierce, author John Marsden and broadcaster Margaret Throsby.

NONFICTION:

History of Queensland by Raymond Evans

Cultural amnesia by Clive James

My life as a traitor by Zarah Ghahramani

Napoleon: the path to power, 1769-1799 by Philip Dwyer

Ochre and rust: artefacts and encounters on Australian frontiers by Phillip Jones

Shakespeare’s wife by Germaine Greer

Vietnam: the Australian war by Paul Ham

Judges for the non-fiction category are Professor Hilary Charlesworth, author Sally Morgan and comedian John Doyle.

The award winners will be announced later in the year, at a date to be announced.

Michelle

Jennifer Byrne from ABC-TV will be broadcasting a special “Greatest characters from fiction” later this year. ABC is seeking input from readers as to which characters should be included on the show.

From the website: “Angsty or angelic, witty or whimsical, sexy or sinister, callous or courageous; Which fictional character leapt off the page to hit your funny bone or twang on your heart strings? Which characters have moved or haunted you? Who was still milling about in your subconscious long after the book was closed?”

You can contribute your suggestions via email from the First Tuesday Book Club website or submit your suggestion to the First Tuesday Book Club discussion board.

Many suggestions have already been made, my favourite include Mr Darcy from Pride and Prejudice (beautifully brought to life by Colin Firth in the BBC production), George Smiley - a John LeCarre character and Jack West from Matthew Reilly. I would add to that my newest favourite characters - Temperance Brennan from Kathy Reichs, Harry Bosch from Michael Connelly and Elvis Cole from Harlan Coben.

Who would your favourites include? Make sure you add them to the ABC list so that they don’t miss out!

Michelle

The program is out for the Melbourne Writers’ Festival 2008 and its huge! It runs from Friday 22nd August to Sunday 31st August and incorporates the Age Book of the Year Awards, author talks, masterclasses, workshops and much more!

Over 300 national and international authors will be taking part in this year’s festival, including Germaine Greer, Salman Rushdieand John Pilger. Children are catered to as well with Emily Rodda and Andy Griffiths on the program. Why not check out some of the authors on the program, then check out some of their books from the library.

If you love reading or have an interest in writing, it is well worth the effort to try to get to the Festival. All the details are available from the Melbourne Writers Festival website.

*** Patrons were treated to a special event yesterday as the Director of the Melbourne Writers Festival, Rosemary Cameron, visited Hampton Park Library’s Book Chat. Pictured at right with Officer in Charge, Carol Bathie, Rosemary gave us a sneak preview of all the exciting things happening. It was both a privilege and pleasure to meet such an articulate and dynamic woman!

Michelle

The Guardian newspaper has come up with a new list of books, this time of ones you don’t want to take on holidays as they will put you to sleep. (although I think sleeping on holidays is not necessarily a bad thing!)

Books that make you go zzzzzz is a short list of books that journalist Mark Hooper started but wasn’t able to finish, with his reasons outlined. These books were:

1. 100 Years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
3. Baudolino by Umberto Eco
4. Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The corrections by Jonathan Franzen

The comments are filled with other books that readers feel belong in that list. Well worth checking out if you need something to make you go to sleep.

As for me, I haven’t read of any these book, so I can’t comment on them, but I know I struggled with the Thomas Covenant series and Anna Karenina.

Do you agree with the books on the list or do you think there are others that should be added? Feel free to leave a comment here with books that have sent you to sleep, or if you feel any of these books don’t belong here.

Michelle

US popular culture blog Lifehacker conducted an informal poll of their readers, asking for the “Books that changed your lives“.

Their top ten responses were:

1. The Bible - 25 votes
2. The Works of Ayn Rand - 23 votes
3. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - 15 votes
4. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - 9 votes
5. The Stranger - 8 votes
6. The Works of George Orwell - 8 votes
7. The Works of Richard Dawkins - 8 votes
8. The Hobbit and Lord of The Rings Trilogy - 7 votes
9. Ender’s Game - 7 votes
10. Dune - 7 votes

Of course its a totally subjective list, but that’s half the fun.

Click on the links to find out more about these titles and to place a free hold if you wish.

The book that changed my life was All quiet on the Western Front, but many other titles have changed my direction slightly over the years. Would love to hear what you book you would list - feel free to leave it in a comment on this blog post.

Michelle

The Miles Franklin Literary Award has been announced with the winner for 2008 being The time we have taken by Steven Carroll. “The Miles Franklin Literary Award celebrates Australian character and creativity and nurtures the continuing life of literature about Australia. It is awarded for the novel of the year which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases.”

There have been many award winning novels over many decades, so there is never a lack of finding a good book to read, especially one that is worthy of an award. But how do you find them?

A feature of our iBistro catalogue, which has fixed during a recent upgrade is the hot links under the search box on the catalogue main page. The two we are interested in for good reading ideas are Recommended Reading and Best Sellers.

Five links are offered in each category on our catalogue homepage, but the more link takes you to a longer list, which includes the Dymocks Top Ten, New York Times Fiction and winners of the Age Book of the Year, Children’s Book Council awards, Hugo and Nebula Science Fiction awards Man Booker Prize and Pulitzer Prize. Click on any of these links and it will give you the list of the titles we hold, that have won that award and where appropriate, what other awards it has won.

To find out where that book is, click on the details link to see the full catalogue record. If its not available, feel free to place a hold (which is also free) and enjoy some of the quality titles that have received international recognition.

You can also find award winning reading in our What do I read next database, which you can access from any computer with your library card number. This is a great tool to find other books like…. whether it be like a particular author, a specific genre or style and many other options. Take the time to explore, you never know, you might just find your next great read there!

Michelle

CCLC subscribes to over 350 different magazines on a huge range of subjects. From trash to deadly serious, there’s something for everyone. My current favourite is Psychology Today (great articles; strange ads). A tip for searching the catalogue: use the words and magazine after your search term - Eg. fitness and magazine or travel and magazine. All the issues that we have will be listed and you can place holds for all but the current edition.

A few facts… With some exceptions, we keep copies of magazines for two years before sending them off to booksale. They have a 2 week loan period and we review our subscriptions annually.

Have you wondered what the [CC] means on some magazine records? It stands for Casey-Cardinia. We found it was too confusing to share magazine records with our other library partners, as we do with books. Too many libraries, titles, editions and copies, so now we have own catalogue records. Eventually, all of our magazine records will show [CC].

If youre happy to read online, we offer an even bigger selection of magazines through our database subscriptions (these collections include general/popular magazines as well as Trade and Academic journals and often include a large backfile). Some examples include:

Choice

Australian Nursing Journal

Architecture Australia

Journal of Educational Research

You can set up an email alert that lets you know when a new edition is available. For help with this or searching for particular titles email us at information@cclc.vic.gov.aunospam (remove nospam from the address)

- Linda

The Telegraph newspaper in the UK has compiled a list of the 50 best cult books. They range from baby care to science-fiction and all are considered classics.

We have reformatted their list as a web based booklist and have added links to our catalogue where we hold the title. We don’t hold them all, with quite a few being very old, very obscure or both.

Check out the list, feel free to reserve the titles you have always meant to get around to read and then let us know which books should have made the top 50.

Here’s a few from me: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, War of the Worlds by HG Wells and my all time favourite classic - All quiet on the Western front by Erich Remarque.

Please leave a comment and tell us your cult classic book - fiction or non-fiction.

Michelle

Hi everyone. Welcome to a priviledged sneak peak of some of my fave reads. I have soooooo many, but, well, you know how it goes …. so many books, so little time! Hehheh heh heh, which is why I’m an audiophile. I can ‘read’ my talking books in the car, doing housework or stacking the dishwasher, cooking up a storm or having a shower. They are truly one of life’s great little inventions! If you haven’t enjoyed a talking book yet, now’s the time to indulge. We have them on cassette, on CDs and some are on MP3s for you techno types :o) So now you can enjoy reading no matter where you are! :o)

The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is surely up there as ‘my read of the year’. This truly unique story details the harrowing times that Henry and Clare deal with as he is the first person in the world to be diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder (CDD) - a fictional disease that sees him frequently yanked from the present and whisked off into the past or the future. It may sound like science-fiction rot, but this wonderful book is at its very essence a love story, one which outshines the tear jerkers of all time.

Another very adult read is the remarkable The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. It’s regaled in the first person by Susie, who has been raped and hacked to pieces by Mr Harvey. She is dead and in heaven, watching over her disintegrating family and trying desperately to make her presence felt and lead someone to the sickening souvenirs Mr Harvey is hoarding. It’s incredibly moving and the tears may well fall, but somehow your heart is filled with a little bit of rapture too.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver is moving too, but in a different way. It is a powerful story that relentlessly drags your heart and mind through the travails of a Baptist Minister’s family embroiled in the Congo’s fight for independence.

The audio book, Matthew Flinders’ Cat by Bryce Courtenay and superbly narrated by Humphrey Bower, is one book that has the knack of polarising people. Some despair over it, using words like “suspend belief”, “anthropomorphic” or “xenophobic”, but I found it absolutely remarkable; a powerful novel with scope that is at times breathtaking. Courtenay’s research, detailed at the end, is nothing short of staggering as the story simultaneously travels with navigator/explorer Matthew Flinders and the seedy streets of 21st century Sydney. It is a very disturbing look at alcoholism, paedophilia, drugs, the indigenous population, institutionalism, death, and at its very core, children at risk and society’s general apathy. It does however proffer a few shining lights to renew one’s faith in the state of being human. The audio book is brilliantly read and I would recommend it every time over borrowing the very large hard copy, though any copy you can get your hands on should awaken an admiration for Courtenay’s storytelling mastery.

On a totally different tack but firmly entrenched in adult land is the hilarious, laugh-out-loud work of one Mr. Carl Hiaasen. Start off with the gut-busting Stormy Weather and then work your way through to the riotous Skinny Dip. The swearing may be full on, but the high-jinks in Florida will have your cheeks aching from laughter.

To close, here’s an absolute pearler! It’s the debut novel by Diane Setterfield called The Thirteenth Tale. The enigmatic novelist, Vida Winter, is old and ailing and hires a young biographer to detail the long-kept secrets of her past. From the very first page, we are drawn into the most atmospheric setting; there is almost a ‘gothic’ haunting feeling in this tale as we are led back in time to the distorted Angelfield family; to a sad giant of a man wandering fire-charred ruins of the Angelfield house; to a missing housekeeper. Couple that with an antiquarian bookshop with lots of musty old volumes, bleak winter weather, parents with a secret … Argh, the desperate need to know what happens keeps you up all night! Great stuff!

I hope there’s something in the above list that has whetted your appetite for a good read. Why don’t you share your great reads with us? We’re always keeping an eye peeled for the next book that just might topple “the year’s best read”, so let us know what you think by posting a comment. We’d love to hear from you!

Happy Reading,

Deb