This year’s National Book Award winners were announced Wednesday night at a dinner in New York City. The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles, won the $10,000 National Book Award for Nonfiction. The fiction prize went to Irish-born writer Colum McCann for Let the Great World Spin, a novel about New York in the 1970s. Keith Waldrop’s Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy took the poetry award and the award for Young People’s Literature went to Phillip Hoose for Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, the true story of an African American teenager who challenged segregation in 1950s Alabama.

The Finalists included:

Fiction
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)
Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Nonfiction
David M. Carroll, Following the Water: A Hydromancer’s Notebook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Sean B. Carroll, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt)
Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (Princeton University Press)

Poetry
Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan University Press)
Ann Lauterbach, Or to Begin Again (Viking Penguin)
Carl Phillips, Speak Low (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Young People’s Literature
Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith (Henry Holt)
David Small, Stitches (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic)
Rita Williams-Garcia, Jumped (HarperTeen/HarperCollins)

All titles are available in LINKcat.

This year’s National Book Award winners were announced Wednesday night at a dinner in New York City. The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles, won the $10,000 National Book Award for Nonfiction. The fiction prize went to Irish-born writer Colum McCann for Let the Great World Spin, a novel about New York in the 1970s. Keith Waldrop’s Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy took the poetry award and the award for Young People’s Literature went to Phillip Hoose for Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, the true story of an African American teenager who challenged segregation in 1950s Alabama.

The Finalists included:

Fiction
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)
Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Nonfiction
David M. Carroll, Following the Water: A Hydromancer’s Notebook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Sean B. Carroll, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt)
Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (Princeton University Press)

Poetry
Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan University Press)
Ann Lauterbach, Or to Begin Again (Viking Penguin)
Carl Phillips, Speak Low (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Young People’s Literature
Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith (Henry Holt)
David Small, Stitches (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic)
Rita Williams-Garcia, Jumped (HarperTeen/HarperCollins)

All titles are available in LINKcat.

The South Central Library System is moving into a new building, and as a result we will be experiencing some service outages from Friday, November 20 through Monday, November 23. On November 20, LINKcat and digital catalog information will be inaccessible. Outages are possible through the remainder of the weekend and the following Monday.

Please call your library to check on the availability of materials when LINKcat is down. We apologize for the inconvenience.

My new favorite novel is The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews.

Now, if I told you the story was about a woman named Hattie, who had just broken up with (been dumped by) her boyfriend in Paris and flown home to take care of the kids of her sister, Min, who needs to be institutionalized for something appearing to be bipolar disorder, and that Hattie decides– sort of on the spur of the moment– to take the kids on a cross country trip to try and find their long absent father, without really knowing where he was, you might think it was an uncomfortable read. It is at times. But it’s so much more than that too. And it really is a fun read, with the occasional side trips into fear and despair.

Road-tripping across country has always been a good device to examine characters up close, on an almost intimate level, and not always at their best. First there’s Hattie who gets to reveal some of herself, sometimes in internal monologue, but often in conversation with the kids. Then there’s 15-year-old Logan, well into the brooding teenage phase of growth who seems focused on developing his basketball skills and seems to be dancing on the edge of serious trouble. Finally, there’s 11-year-old Thebes (occasionally know as Theodora), an absolute charmer of a character, with purple hair, and a flair for art and chatter that will make you want to take this child home with you. Min appears mostly in flashback, her gradual and recurring descent(s) into madness often recalled by Hattie, whose motivation to keep her sister’s little family intact conflicts with her fear of being overwhelmed by the demands of being a “parent” to Logan and Thebes.

The narration just speeds you along, revealing the characters as they are, as well as looking at Hattie and Min growing up and the various challenges Min faced in her somewhat irrevocable descent into despair. Parts of it are heartbreaking and bleak, others are uplifting and empowering and you can’t help but hope everything turns out all right because these people are truly worth the effort.

I have to confess, I’ve read through this book three times. Not something I usually do, but I kept picking it up and falling back into the story where these weird and troubling and hopeful characters tried to find a little bit of that “happily-ever-after” that really should be there for them. And the writing is that good.

I don’t usually quote at length from the books I review but I do want to end by giving you a taste of what I’ve been enjoying.

On Thebes: “She couldn’t get very far past that before it all erupted and she was sobbing in my arms and then all the captive little heifers in the barn next to us joined in, crying and lowing like a bovine choir of angels in solidarity with Thebes.”

On Logan: “He looked away, towards Saturn, or farther up, maybe towards some satellite that only he could see. I liked the silver and gold specks. They softened him up. He looked like a sweet, kind of gay, raver alien waiting for his crew to take him back to space, to some benevolent planet that partied hard but happily. I left him to pine and sparkle in the moonlight.”

In the last week we’ve answered our first two reference questions via Twitter. While it might not be the fastest or most private way to contact us with a question, we’re happy to answer the questions we see via Twitter or Facebook or our other social media accounts.

Which brings us to the answer to one of those two reference questions, which is more complex than Twitter’s 140 characters allow… One of our followers, in response to a post announcing our excitement that we now offer e-book and iPod compatible audiobook downloads through the OverDrive Digital Download Center, requested that a sidebar search category be created for Mac users to find compatible downloads.

Madison Public Library is part of a statewide consortium that runs the OverDrive Digital Download Center, a collection of nearly 5,000 downloadable audiobooks, video, music and now e-books. We can’t update the sidebar options to say “Plays on Mac” but if you look at the sidebar, you can choose either “iPod-compatible Audiobooks” or “View all MP3 Audiobooks” to find titles you can use.  iPod-compatible audiobooks can be transferred to an iPod or iPhone through iTunes on either a Mac or a PC. MP3 audiobooks can be played on a Mac OR transferred to iPod or iPhone. Also, if you do a title or author search, there are icons for each title showing what formats the title come in. Screenshots of menus and download steps for getting OverDrive Media Console are on our Flickr photostream.

Background info: Audiobooks comprise the largest part of the Digital Download Center collection. Most are - for various digital rights management reasons - available only as WMA (windows media audio) files for playing on a PC or WMA-compatible devices. Recently, one fourth of the WMA titles became iPod compatible when users access the files using the most recent version of the OverDrive Media Console (software required to use OverDrive). As of today, there are 4065 WMA audiobooks, 218 MP3 audiobooks, 1000 iPod compatible WMA audiobooks, 318 videos, 178 music albums, and 232 eBooks in the collection.