This one's for the students

Going to school? Me too! Are you writing a paper? So am I! Do you think that the "Works cited" page is the hardest part? I know I do.

I used to just write down a list of all my references, and then leave the actual composition and formatting of the list until the very last moment. Why? Because it was hard.

I didn't know how to cite different types of resources. What if I wanted to cite a web page, or a newspaper article, or a documentary film? What if the professor wanted my references in APA format, and I'm only familiar with MLA? The whole process was daunting, and procrastinating only made it worse.

Well, I've discovered that there are good citation tools online. I don't mean websites that explain the rules (although there are lots of those) - I'm talking about websites that do all the work.

I like BibMe. It's free to sign up for an account. If you need to cite a book, type in the author, title, or ISBN in the search box, select your book, and voila - it creates a citation for you, in whatever format you need. Same thing with magazine articles - you type in the relevant information, and BibMe creates the cite. You can paste the url of a website into the search box and get a cite for an Internet resource.

BibMe will save several bibliographies for you in whatever format you need, so you can paste them right into your papers.

I went back to school a few years ago to get a degree in Library Science, and I've been using BibMe for all my projects. I wish it had been around back in my undergrad days - it's certainly easier than the way we used to do it.

If you're a student, take all the help you can get - try BibMe.

Away by Amy Bloom

Lillian Leyb is a newcomer in 1920s New York. She is young and pretty and barely speaks English, but she is no innocent; the survivor of pogroms that killed her entire family in Russia, Lillian is not about to let New York defeat her.

She outwits the other applicants for a seamstress job at the Goldfadn Yiddish Theatre. When the handsome lead actor of the theater seems attracted to her, she lets him know she might be available. When his father also expresses an interest, well, that too is negotiable.

But Lillian's cynical and practical stoicism is shattered when she hears a rumor: her baby daughter, Sophie, believed to have been murdered with the rest of her village in Russia, may still be alive somewhere in Siberia. That possibility changes everything. Soon Lillian leaves the safety of her Manhattan apartment and embarks upon an odyssey to find out the truth about Sophie's fate.

That quick summary doesn't do justice to the richness of Away by Amy Bloom. I loved the opening chapters, about the immigrant Jewish experience on the Lower East Side. Lillian's guess at how to get to Siberia from New York sends her on a heartbreaking voyage westward, to Chicago and Seattle and then to Alaska. Along the way she encounters the outcasts and down-and-outs of America in the 1920s: prostitutes, prospectors, grifters, homosexuals, and other vagabonds like herself.

A hearty Yiddish mix of tragedy and wit, Away is a suspenseful tale of a not-very-respectable heroine and her amazing quest.

Beauty Queens by Libba Bray

Obnoxious, kind of preachy, and absolutely hilarious—Beauty Queens is a thrilling feminist pop-culture-eviscerating extravaganza of laughs, worthy of reading yourself or suggesting to your teens.

The Corporation, monopolistic maker of such fine self-improvement products as Lady ‘Stache Off and Maxi-Pad Pets, is sponsoring the Miss Teen Dream Beauty Pageant—but the plane carrying the 50 contestants crashes on a desert island, killing off pilots, stewardesses, adult chaperones, and even a few Teen Dreamers! The remaining beauty queens must struggle to survive while keeping up with their exfoliating, singing drills, and ab crunches.

Bray keeps the pace quick by alternating chapters focusing on different girls, adding in commercial breaks and footnotes from the Corporation, and including the girls’ Teen Dream Pageant applications—with everything they crossed out.

Gradually, the girls adjust to living on the island, finding pride in their survival skills and their strengths, changing their priorities to reflect their new reality. When a ship goes aground on the shore of the island, carrying a load of dashing pirate teenage boys who’ve gone AWOL from the “reality show” they were filming, the girls suddenly have a whole new set of issues. And when it turns out the island is actually a secret government military base in the pocket of the Corporation, things get even zanier.

OK, this book is NOT SUBTLE AT ALL. There were points where I found the preachiness kind of off-putting—but I stuck with it for the humor, and I’m glad I did. For many teens, Beauty Queens may be just the irreverent refreshment they need to question the cookie-cutter consumer teen magazine mentality that teaches them uniqueness is just another shade of lipstick.

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

The Psychopath Test is the newest book by Jon Ronson, author of The Men Who Stare At Goats (which was made into a hilarious movie with George Clooney) and Them: Adventures with Extremists.

Ronson’s foray into the world of psychopathology is much more fun than the topic would suggest. Ronson has what he calls a “nebbishy” outlook on life. (“Weak-willed or timid” from the Yiddish nebekh, according to the Free Online Dictionary.) His self-deprecating narrative style brings out the absurd in –- well, everything. And it turns out psychopaths are actually very funny. At least, you know, on paper.

Ronson’s curiosity is initially piqued by a mysterious book called Being or Nothingness, an anonymous tome interspersed with blank pages which was delivered to a number of researchers in different fields. Ronson's attempt to track down the author somehow opens an investigative path leading to Scientologists, Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital, a Haitian killer, and David Shayler, a former British Security Service officer who at one time claimed to be the Messiah. Along the way, Ronson attends a training course on how to recognize psychopaths, which causes him to start spotting psychopathic tendencies behind every bush.

Ronson looks at how the psychopath test is being applied in practice, how we label people, how we define mental health. More broadly, he touches on the explosion of mental illness diagnoses and how that grew out of one man’s desire to provide an alternative to psychoanalysis. There are fascinating threads that don’t have time to be fully developed in the book, like is there really a provable relationship between psychopathology and becoming a CEO or a politician? and where is the line between recognizing and addressing serious mental health issues and overdiagnosing and overmedicating people?

Really fascinating stuff, and Ronson leads us through it with accessibility and humor. I’m putting this guy’s other work on hold.

Science fiction award winners - get them here!

The Hugo Award is arguably the most prestigious accolade in the science fiction world. Winners of this coveted prize were announced by the Science Fiction Writers of America this weekend.

To the surprise of few, Connie Willis's masterful two-volume novel, Blackout /All Clear, won for best science fiction novel. It is the tale of a group of Oxford history students from the future, who are sent back in time to study England in World War II. They gradually become horrifyingly convinced that their presence has changed history, altering the course of the war. and preventing them from going home. Willis is a great favorite of mine. I wrote about Blackout here, and I also recommend her earlier, even more amazing work, The Doomsday Book.

Several other novels were also nominated, so if you like science fiction, you should check them out. Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold is a highly-enjoyable space-opera, the latest in her long-running Miles Vorkosigan series. If you haven't been introduced to these rip-roaring pleasure reads yet, I recommend that you start with The Warrior's Apprentice. I find them irresistible.

I haven't yet read the other three nominees, but they certainly look interesting. The Dervish House by Ian McDonald tells of the consequences of a terrorist bomb strike in a rich and strange near-future Istanbul. Feed by Mira Grant is a postapocalyptic zombiefest in which bloggers wield surprising political power. And The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin is fantasy on an epic scale, in which the vicious power struggles of an enormous empire play out in a world where gods are real.

The Best Novella Hugo went to The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang, about a zookeeper who is hired as a trainer for digients, artificial-intelligence creatures that are neither children nor pets.

The Newport Library congratulates all the winners and nominees. If you like science fiction, check them out - or come in and talk to us about our favorites. Quite a few staff at the Newport Library are science fiction fans; we'd be happy to share our favorites.

Living in A Rain Shadow

When so much television seems to be screaming at the audience these days, either in violence or just plain volume, I’d like to recommend Rain Shadow, an Australian mini-series that first aired in 2007. More of a whisper than a shout, Rain Shadow has an understated beauty and power that is often missing from that vast wasteland of TV.

Jill Blake is a young veterinarian fresh out of college who comes to practice in Paringa, a drought-plagued farming community near Adelaide. Her boss, Doctor Kate McDonald, played by Rachel Ward, angrily blocks Jill’s well-intentioned inquiries when she starts to uncover a secret that threatens to destroy the livelihood of every rancher in the area.

The scenery is dry and spare and the acting equally so. Rain Shadow is about people scratching a living out of a land that takes an awful lot but does not give back much in return. And yet these people love that land and try to hold out as best they can despite the enormous odds against them. It’s about people coming to learn more about themselves, and how doing what’s right is not often as easy as we may think.

Inexplicably, Rain Shadow only aired for one season, but I think you’ll enjoy all six episodes we have in the library. You can reserve it here.

Magical realism on the Oregon coast

Neawanaka is a little town on the Oregon coast. The logging industry has pretty much died, the shingle factory is going out of business, and not many people fish commercially anymore. But in spite of its hardships, the town at the mouth of the Mink River is a magical place, where crows speak poetry, black bears rescue children, and people while away their hours telling stories, rather than watching television or playing computer games.

Brian Doyle's novel Mink River is a weird and charming novel that tells the tale of Neawananka. Skipping from character to character, it explores the town's geography and its wildlife, its myths and tales, its dark woods and flashing streams.
The book doesn't have a driving plot: it's a portrait of one summer in the life of the town, and the stories that people tell there. Two Public Works employees interpret their mandate very broadly, meddling in people’s lives. A boy whizzes everywhere at full speed on his bicycle, until an accident brings him to a stop. Two teenagers love each other, and have decisions to make. A sculptor suffers from depression. A cop listens to Puccini. A man beats his son.

Doyle's prose and punctuation are idiosyncratic. He plays with words, as when he ascribes to two boys in a high school classroom "general recklessness and boneheadery and lazitude and punishness and detentionery." This will either annoy or please you. Those aren't real words -- but we recognize those boys, right?

I enjoyed the rhythm of Doyle's storytelling, even when it devolves into long lists of sensations, like this amazing description of the local repair shop:

"Think of all the rich dark male smells you have ever liked, the smells that remind you of your dad ... Paint in cans that have been imperfectly sealed so a touch of the smell leaks out, and flat whippy paint-stirring sticks half-coated in dried paint atop the cans ... And the smells of sawn cedar and maple and fir boards. Ashes. Varnish. Plywood. Cigars. Somewhere on a shelf a redolent piece of redwood. Sweat. Boots. Oil. A hint of gasoline as if it had been spilled quite a long time ago and cleaned up meticulously but the room remembers when it happened. Rubber. Sawdust. The handled smell of tools. Liniment. Coffee. The brown smell of boxes and cardboard. Beer. The vacation-cabin smell of pine. Oiled saws. Old newspapers. Woodsmoke. The burnt-wire smell of old radio and television tubes. Turpentine. The grandmotherly smell of old upholstery rising warmly from the sagging couch in the corner. Apples. Wet clothes. Bread. Crow."

Full disclosure: I know someone who thinks Mink River is inaccurate and pretentiously-written. What can I say? I disagree. I think that Mink River is enchanting - not a swift page-turner, but a meandering read filled with delightful images. If you're intrigued, read Mink River and decide for yourself.