New arrivals

It's always exciting to open our back-to-school cartons of library books. There is always a crowd of reading "lifers" waiting to reserve new and long-awaited fiction titles.

This year I am excited about two nonfiction series that I hope I can convince faculty to incorporate in their classes. The first is the Modern Library Chronicles. Each of these thirty trade-paperback titles is under 200 pages and explores a historical theme: Catholicism, Napoleon, Evolution, WWII, the Balkans, etc. They are, I think, digestible literary nonfiction reads that are authoritative, eloquent, and accessible. My hope is that HS students might have a positive experience with an engaging literary nonfiction work.

The other series, from Icon Books, is comprised of graphic guides to Shakespeare, Capitalism, Ethics, etc. These palm-sized books combine captioned ink illustrations with side-bars of text to explain some rangy topics. Some further investigation yesterday led me to an iPod App for these titles. I bought one title and "Story View" format is really takes great advantage of these visualizations.