Summary from Novelist: Young Sarah Carrier tries to cope with life in Salem, Massachusetts, after her mother, Martha Carrier, is accused, tried, and hanged as a witch.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Lost City of Z: a tale of deadly obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
Summary from Novelist: Interweaves the story of British explorer Percy Fawcett, who vanished during a 1925 expedition into the Amazon, with the author's own quest to uncover the mysteries surrounding Fawcett's final journey and the secrets of what lies deep in the Amazon jungle.
Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian
Summary from Novelist: During the final months of World War II, a small group of people make their way westward across a ravaged Europe in a desperate attempt to reach British and American lines.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Greetings from author Padma Venkatraman
As I look forward to the RI Center for the Book Meeting and being in the company of librarians and books in my all time favorite place in the world – a public library, I find myself thinking back to one of the most important discovery of my life, which I think I made when I was six years old and lived in India.
My youngest aunt, Sundari, who was visiting, had brought gifts for me and for my cousin Ramya, who is just four months younger than I am. I was certain my aunt hated me and loved my cousin, because cousin Ramya’s gift was a large, colorful board game and mine was just a book. Not even a brightly colored picture book, or at least a book with black and white illustrations, but instead a book filled with nothing but words.
I remember staring unhappily at the endless rows of print that stretched across the front page for many long minutes.
Then something magical happened. As I looked at them, those little words, those marks on paper, carried me into another place and time. I heard voices – clearer than any on the radio or a record player; I saw pictures – sharper and more real than any painting. And by the time I put the book away, I had met people as real to me as my friends and family were.
But that evening, I saw a beggar child who looked about my age. The child’s eyes reminded me of how privileged I was to be able to read; that in India, at least, education and books and libraries were accessible only to those with wealth.
Years later, I came to Virginia, to the College of William and Mary’s graduate school. There, I saw my first public library.
“How much do I have to pay to become a member?” I asked. To my astonishment, I was told I did not have to pay anything at all. All those shelves of books were open and accessible to me and to anyone who wanted to walk in through those doors. The amazing public library system became, in my mind, the most beautiful practical expressions of American ideals. To this day, I still believe that there are few better examples of the best of American culture.
So it is truly an honor for me to present the keynote address at the Rhode Island Center for the Book’s annual meeting. I love libraries just as my as Vidya, my protagonist in CLIMBING THE STAIRS, does. Public libraries have been my haven in times of homesickness; public librarians have been a source of support to me since I began climbing the stairs as a writer; and I hope very much that Rhode Island’s citizens (librarians and others) will bless me (inside and outside public libraries) as I keep Climbing the Stairs as a published author.
Padma Venkatraman (http://www.climbingthestairsbook.com/)
Padma
My youngest aunt, Sundari, who was visiting, had brought gifts for me and for my cousin Ramya, who is just four months younger than I am. I was certain my aunt hated me and loved my cousin, because cousin Ramya’s gift was a large, colorful board game and mine was just a book. Not even a brightly colored picture book, or at least a book with black and white illustrations, but instead a book filled with nothing but words.
I remember staring unhappily at the endless rows of print that stretched across the front page for many long minutes.
Then something magical happened. As I looked at them, those little words, those marks on paper, carried me into another place and time. I heard voices – clearer than any on the radio or a record player; I saw pictures – sharper and more real than any painting. And by the time I put the book away, I had met people as real to me as my friends and family were.
But that evening, I saw a beggar child who looked about my age. The child’s eyes reminded me of how privileged I was to be able to read; that in India, at least, education and books and libraries were accessible only to those with wealth.
Years later, I came to Virginia, to the College of William and Mary’s graduate school. There, I saw my first public library.
“How much do I have to pay to become a member?” I asked. To my astonishment, I was told I did not have to pay anything at all. All those shelves of books were open and accessible to me and to anyone who wanted to walk in through those doors. The amazing public library system became, in my mind, the most beautiful practical expressions of American ideals. To this day, I still believe that there are few better examples of the best of American culture.
So it is truly an honor for me to present the keynote address at the Rhode Island Center for the Book’s annual meeting. I love libraries just as my as Vidya, my protagonist in CLIMBING THE STAIRS, does. Public libraries have been my haven in times of homesickness; public librarians have been a source of support to me since I began climbing the stairs as a writer; and I hope very much that Rhode Island’s citizens (librarians and others) will bless me (inside and outside public libraries) as I keep Climbing the Stairs as a published author.
Padma Venkatraman (http://www.climbingthestairsbook.com/)
Padma
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Last chance to nominate a title for the 2010 Reading Across RI selection
The Reading Across Rhode Island Nominating committee will do a lot of reading and meet a number of times this summer to discuss the Reading Across RI 2010 selection.
Nominate a title today! Deadline for nominations is June 20, 2009.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Did that happen to you? ~ Ron Carlson
One of the things a writer gets asked is: did that happen to you? Do you write from your own experiences? It’s a good question. We all know stories which seem absolutely made up and we all know stories that seem very close to life. I have never really been on a construction crew, like the three men in Five Skies, though I have done a lot of handiwork, and my father was a very fine engineer, and I’ve camped out plenty and cooked in those places, and I’ve fished in some remote spots, and I’ve spent some wonderful times in the out of doors. As a writer, you are required to write closely enough that you believe it. This is a responsibility and a pleasure. When people ask me if I write from my personal experiences, I answer: Yes, I do. I write from my personal experiences – whether I’ve had them or not. This sounds like a joke a first, and I’m sure to repeat it in Rhode Island this coming weekend, but it is not a joke. It is just one way of speaking about using the imagination in an empathetic way. As a writer, you send yourself on the journey. If you’re digging post holes for a fence, you take your time and dig in the red earth, sentence by sentence, even if there are rocks.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Scrip-scraps, Ron Carlson
Years ago, probably around 1991 or 92, I was at a family cabin in the mountains of Utah on a fresh cold morning in the summer and I had my notebook and I wrote a bit of dialogue between two men about something that had been tugging at me for some time. The two men would become Darwin and Arthur, when I would finally turn my full attention to the book more than ten years later. I had the one man ask the other: Did you ever build anything that lasted? Or was it all temporary? And the other man answers: Once in Aspen for a film we had enough time to put a deck on the directors house and that’s still there. The section was a kind of curiosity for me and I kept it in my note folder, along with all of the odd notes I keep. That folder is two inches thick and full of scrip-scraps of phrases, ideas, and the like. I could see from my dialogue that I wanted to write about work, the idea of work, but I didn’t know how to do it. I’d been writing stories and I saw the notion of work was bigger than might fit in a story. Then later I wrote the night three men are driving a truck in the snow and the book started to open up for me. ~ Ron Carlson
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