The old TV series Batman contains some real gems. In 1966 the writers of the TV series created a new character that had not appeared in the Batman comic series. Bookworm played by beloved actor Roddy McDowall was created specifically for National Reading Week in April 1966 to encourage reading. Note the reading light integrated into Bookworm's hat. Very clever costume choice!
We have a lot of Janet Evanovich novels on sale at the Booknook. This number one New York Times and Amazon best selling author started her writing career under the pen name Steffie Hall with short romance novels. Then she created the female bounty hunter Stephanie Plum, an unemployed lingerie salesperson who needed to find work doing something else. Bounty hunting is a big departure from selling underwear! Come pick up one of these books for only a buck at the Booknook today! The Friends is currently looking for volunteers to help sort donated books every Wednesday at the downtown library at Evergreen and C streets. You will be trained to evaluate the value of books using the internet and other resources so that the most valuable books can be sold at our online Amazon bookstore. The less valuable books are sold at the Booknook for just $1 which is still a great value. Book sorters are asked to commit to a six month period minimum because your training is lengthy and makes you quite valuable to other used book retailers.
Working for the Friends is kind of like having a job with all the perks of friendly coworkers, great bosses, excellent training and good working environment. And like any job, do good work and you'll get a good reference for your job search increasing your chances of landing a great job in the private sector. To apply please visit our Volunteer website. I sense a theme here, with the word dead in every title! Charlaine Harris is a New York Times bestselling author who has produced many series but all of these books are from her Sookie Stackhouse (Southern Vampire) series. This novel series was dramatized for the small screen in HBO's True Blood TV series. If you liked True Blood you will enjoy these books from this very prolific author. Only $1 each at the Booknook now! We have a good selection of Star Trek novels on sale. We placed them in our Fiction section but to group them together they have been placed in the Biography section so they aren't scattered around randomly, sorted alphabetically by author as would normally be the case. If you love Star Trek come on down and take a look. These are stories that have (so far) never been made into movies or TV shows, although one can dream... We have books 3 and 4 of the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer in the Booknook. Of course everyone knows of the connection of the Twilight series with the Northwest, but did you know that a small part of the first movie that was not in the book was filmed here in Vancouver? The marina scene where two of the vampires murder a fisherman in his boat was filmed at Kadow's Marina off Lower River Road. The owners Lloyd and Bev Kadow are listed in the credits as Boat Wranglers, as the film crew spent a lot of time asking for boats to be moved around to make the scenes perfect. Also the end credits for the first movie roll over an undulating water background that was filmed at the marina in the Columbia River.
We have some interesting folks portrayed in the Biography section of the Booknook. At polar opposites politically are Sarah Palin in Going Rogue: An American Life and Barack Obama's The Audacity Of Hope. Moving to the topic of space we have First Man: The Life Of Neil A. Armstrong and Barbara Eden's autobiography Jeannie Out Of The Bottle. What do those two have in common? Remember the pretense of the TV show I Dream Of Jeannie. Major Nelson played by Larry Hagman, who later starred in Dallas, was an American astronaut who splashed down the Pacific Ocean during a mission, landed on an island, found a bottle and opened it to find Jeannie inside! Astronauts and space were all the rage in 1960's and the antics of the otherwise professional and proper Major Nelson saddled with the troublesome and impetuous Jeannie led to no end of hilarious story lines for the writers. We have a good selection of Sue Grafton hardbacks in excellent condition at the Booknook. Her murder mysteries, A-Z were inspired by her daydreaming of ways to murder her ex-husband and turned her lust for vengeance into a very profitable passion. I rather wonder what her ex-husband thinks of all this? Read about it here! If you thought Indiana Jones was a fearless explorer you haven't met Napoleon Chagnon. Dr. Chagnon spent years in the jungles of the Orinoco river basin (remember Enya's #1 hit, Orinoco Flow?) with the Yamomanӧ (Yamomani for those who can’t find UTF8 code U+04E7 on their keyboard) researching their language, customs, behavior and genealogy. This fantastic adventure begins with his first encounter with the Yamomanӧ entering a village full of warriors with nocked and drawn arrows pointed right at his head and ends with a world full of angry Cultural Anthropologists demonizing him for embracing science and for accepting Darwin. See my Amazon review here. You will find this book on the 4th floor in the Anthropology section, 304.5 Chagnon. Don't miss The big 4 day book sale over at the old library at 1007 E Mill Plain Blvd! 25,000+ books for $1 or less! 4 days only this weekend!
John Michael Williams, an old friend of mine who also taught electronics in Silicon Valley recently released a new edition of his self paced Verilog tutorial, Digital VLSI Design with Verilog. I was able to catch up with him to talk about the book. First a little background; After spending some years at sea in the U. S. Navy, John Michael Williams returned to school for degrees at Columbia University, the University of Chicago and Southern Illinois University, eventually studying human vision in postdoctoral study at the University of Michigan. He moved to California in 1982 and spent significant work time as an applications engineer at Daisy Systems and then at Compass Design Automation. After attending various physics-related classes at Stanford, he began teaching at Silicon Valley Technical Institute, where he wrote the first edition of "Digital VLSI Design with Verilog" and many other course workbooks which now are posted at Scribd. He moved to Oregon a few years ago, where he remains mostly retired. (From the publisher's About the Author note) Dan: What motivated you to write Digital VLSI Design with Verilog in the first place? John: I was teaching a Verilog 2-day course, which I expanded to 12 weeks after I started teaching at SVTI (Silicon Valley Technical Institute, now Silicon Valley Polytechnic Institute). I started by writing day-by-day student instructional material, which the SVTI owner, Ali Iranmanesh, realized that I could combine to a single course book. I approached Springer about it, and within less than a year wrote a publishable 12 week course -- the first edition. Dan: Did you have any special challenges in writing this book? John: The code examples had to be simulated and re-simulated to get them right. The first edition ran 450+ pages, and I had to post a combined "teacher's guide - correction list" which steadily grew as I taught the course repeatedly during the next few years. Dan: How did the publishing process work? Did someone at the SVTI help you with the mundane details of publishing like proof-reading, cover design, formatting? John: I did all the work myself, although Springer somewhat reformatted my first draft copy. The cover design was Springers, except for the front and back covers' text. The 27 problem solutions were mine, provided in an on-disk DVD. Dan: How were sales of the first edition? John: They were not great but adequate to repay me for all the writing. Dan: Why did you come out with a second edition? John: The final IEEE approval of SystemVerilog came out soon after the first edition; so, I wanted to include its major Verilog-related features. All of IEEE Verilog is included in SystemVerilog, with some expanded features, plus new non-Verilog materials such as assertions and interfaces. Since about 2010, there is no more "Verilog" from IEEE, just "SystemVerilog". The second edition (2014) not only includes a new chapter on SystemVerilog, but it also contains some introductory material on another Verilog offshoot, "Verilog A/MS". I improved the writing of the first edition everywhere, made all known corrections, and expanded the Verilog basics to make the book more useful to beginners. The net result was almost 100 new pages. The 2nd edition also includes a complete set of problem solutions, available for download from Springer. Dan: You’ve written articles all your life. I assume you get an extra boost to your ego having a hard cover book out there with your name on it? John: No real extra ego boost -- I just am happy not to have to printout out dozens of pages of text, every week, should I teach the course again. Since I moved to Oregon in 2011, I have taught the course just once, using an internet-based presentation (DropBox). In 1974 Joe Haldeman wrote my very favorite book, The Forever War. I've nearly read the covers off it. In this book William Mandella (named for the peace symbol, sort of...) becomes a soldier in the UNEF and spends 246 years leaping through wormholes to let us watch the Earth evolve from 1997 to see pot legal and cheap, sex rampant, gayness fully accepted, in fact preferred with heterosexuality considered a "curable" deviancy. Everyone is taken care of including the warriors. Well, except those too old and not politically connected, like his mother. His cadre might suffer a horrific death like poor Ho on the Teddy Bear planet. But if their "suit" can save them they are in luck. The free UNEF doctors can regenerate most limbs, even if you swim into the mouth of a giant shark on "Heaven", the only other planet in addition to Earth that the Taurans must never find. Director Ridley Scott has finally gotten the rights after 25 years of trying. The buzz is electric! "Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship." Remarks at the Dartmouth College Commencement Exercises, Hanover, New Hampshire, 6/14/53 We have a large selection of John Jakes novels in the Fiction section, under J of course. Mr. Jakes wrote a large number of books on historical fiction and one of his trilogies on the Civil War was made into a mini-series for ABC television. His website is at http://www.johnjakes.com/ We have a copy of James Carville's 2009 book, 40 More Years: How The Democrats Will Rule The Next Generation. This book was totally wrong of course, given the whooping the Democrats took in the 2014 mid term elections, but sometimes it's good to go back and do a post-mortem when any prediction fails to come true. Why did James Carville think that the Democrats could not lose any future elections? Did he believe that President Obama would transform the country so radically that Republicans could not be elected to any post? What signs did Mr. Carville read incorrectly? Whatever your political persuasion it might be fun to see if you can read the "tea leaves" and dissect the failure of the Democrats to bring Mr. Carville's fantasy to life. For those who love murder mysteries, we have three of the Alphabet Murder books by Sue Grafton, "D" Is For Deadbeat, "L" Is For Lawless and, oddly, "M" Is For Malice. Why would an author commit to writing 26 books about murder? It's an interesting story. After a rather acrimonious divorce, Sue found herself daydreaming about different ways to murder her ex-husband. She realized that rather than wasting her time stewing in anger, she could make money and be productive putting her ideas down in novel form. All of Sue's books in this series follow the exploits of Kinsey Millhone, an orphan who was raised by her aunt Gin and who now makes her living as a private investigator in the small town of Santa Teresa California investigating all kinds of foul crimes. After a few volumes you will find Kinsey a very likable person who is very good at her job, sometimes too good! Interestingly the audiobook versions of this series are all narrated by one person, Judy Kaye who does a fantastic job, she is Kinsey Millhone. Currently the total audio book time is 222 hours in the series. Those of us who are crazy about books are very often also crazy about movies, and especially movies about the origin of books. The movie Creation tells the story of Charles Darwin's struggle to produce his masterpiece, On The Origin Of Species and his "war with God." In this movie, Paul Bettany reprises the role he played in Master and Commander which borrowed heavily from another book by Darwin, Voyage Of The Beagle. Both books can be had in one volume with the call number 576.82 DARWIN. In the movie, Darwin's wife is played by Jennifer Connelly (Rocketeer, A Beautiful Mind) who is also in real life, Paul Bettany's wife. The most interesting twist in this story is that Paul Bettany is an atheist and his wife Jennifer is a Christian, exactly the same as Darwin and his wife and cousin, Emma. The movie makes the point that had Darwin not married his first cousin, he might not have been able to see the effects of inbreeding on his children and might have missed the boat on evolution. Agnostics, atheists and religious people can all enjoy this movie because it shows the mental anguish Darwin went through trying not to offend his wife, his friend and pastor and society in general. We highly recommend that you read both books before watching Creation to get the most out of it. The only error in the movie was to cast the diminutive Toby Jones as T.H. Huxley, who was in real life as tall as Darwin, but Toby was chosen (according to insiders) for his irascible and combative portrayal of the irascible and combative Huxley. Still, it's a great way to see how one of the most important books of all time was created. Mark your calendars! The Friends of Vancouver Community Library Holiday Book Sale! Saturday, Nov. 15, 10:30 am - 5 pm Sunday, Nov. 16, noon - 4 pm Special Friends Sale Friday evening, November 14, 5 pm - 8 pm (Memberships may be purchased at the door) Columbia Room, Ground Floor, Vancouver Community Library
Don't miss out. If you enjoyed The Borne Ultimatum with Matt Damon perhaps you should read the original book published in 1990 by Robert Ludlum. We have a hard cover edition that is in good condition. It is always fun to read the book to see what the movie missed. It must be tough for an author to wait 17 years for his book to be turned into a movie, but he pulled it off! Only $1 for a hardcover! StoryCon was a fun event and we sold a lot of books! The biggest seller was a book titled Eleanor by Jason Gurley. The talk of the show was that Jason secured a deal with a big publisher to re-release it so all current copies of the book may become more valuable than the sale price. Not a bad reason to buy a copy by visiting this link! Join us for StoryCon 2014 at Vancouver Community Library this Saturday! Books from 30 authors will be on sale and the authors will be there for readings, signings, lectures and stories. It will be a great event and every book you buy makes money to help support the library! It seems like we always have lots of Tom Clancy novels in the Booknook, but here are three Audio Book versions, The Hunt For Red October, Without Remorse and Bio-Strike. Audio books are great for listening when you are fighting traffic on the way to work, sitting on a plane on your way to Europe or just relaxing at home. Although not everyone has a cassette player anymore, you can buy a unit that will convert cassettes to MP3 and then you can put the whole book on your phone. All for $1 at the Booknook now! The Trumpet reports that a book loving resident of the Gobi Desert, Dashdondog Jamba has been running a Mobile Children's Library for the last 20 years. After the fall of Communism in the 1990s most libraries were closed, so Mr. Jamba kept his love of books alive by roaming over 50,000 miles by camel, horse and cart, or now by van throughout the Gobi Desert bringing books to children and adults who otherwise had no access to books. Those of us who work at the Vancouver Community Library appreciate having a short commute to the library by car or bus. How would we fare bringing books to children in Mongolia by camel? |
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