Create Your Story at the CharlotteLaw Library

Next week is National Library Week and the Theme for the week’s events is CREATE YOUR OWN STORY@Your Library. 

Learning to read. Searching for a new job. Starting a research project. Libraries have always been a place for new beginnings and this week honors you and all of the personal stories that you bring into our library doors each and every day!

April 11^th 7:30 a.m. to 9a.m. (while supplies last)

Our week kicks off with our Donut and Coffee event.  Enjoy a donut and some coffee while you “create your own story” on our themed Story Board. Don’t forget to bring your teddy bear donation (or cash donation) for Levine Children’s Hospital.  Join us in the lobby of the Library!

April 11^th -13^th

The law library will be hosting a READ Poster Scavenger Hunt for three days during Library Week.  Students will have the chance to win some exciting prizes and discover favorite “reads” of some of their favorite faculty and staff while answering some funny and intriguing questions. The scavenger hunt runs from 9 to 6 p.m. on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. The drawing for the grand prize will be held on Thursday April 14^th. For more details on the prizes and the rules for the scavenger hunt, see the staff at the Reference Desk in the Library.

April 13^th from 12:30-1:30p.m

Join us for a PEP approved event, co-sponsored with CPD.  Ari Kaplan, an outstanding speaker who joined us last year, will return to talk about getting a job in this tough job market.  Ari will speak about how to “Stand Out in a Stagnant Economy.”  Join the growing list of students who have already signed up for this event.  Room 402 &404.

April 13^th from 2-5p.m

The Library will hold its 4^th Annual Ice Cream Social.  This is the hit of the school year, providing an opportunity for students, faculty, and staff to mingle and enjoy free ice cream!  Create your own story with ice cream.  Join the CLS Team on the 1^st floor in the CLC. 

April 11^th -13^th

The law library will partner with the Delta Theta Phi fraternity to collect stuffed animals and cash donations during each event for the Levine Children’s Hospital.  See the posters in the elevators and lobby for more details.

Top Gun Nose Dives on Oprah’s Couch: Meet Ashley

Despite the fact that most modern pop-up books are geared towards children, it wasn’t until I reached adulthood that my fetish for them truly blossomed.  Pop-ups were originally developed for adults in the 13^th century to illustrate scientific and mathematic principles, and in the years since then artists, scientists, philosophers and book designers have continued this art form and in doing so, challenged the traditional books bibliographic boundaries.  No genre of the written word can even begin to match the prodigious imagination and artistic skill that go into the creation and handcrafting of these works.  This particular piece, obviously marketed towards adults, is the latest in my collection.  Americans as a whole love their gossip magazines, but when set side by side with this book, People, Us Weekly, Star and OK! become nothing but flat and lifeless rages.  I mean, you can’t pull tabs on their pages to make Tom Cruise leap up and down like a hyperactive monkey, can you?

Ashley Moye, Serials Librarian

The Pop-up Book of Celebrity Meltdowns / by Melcher Media

Synopsis

From the makers of the cult classic Pop-Up Book of Phobias comes a satirical celebration of celebrities gone wild. Everyone has a bad day now and then. But when superstars fall apart in public, it’s international news! The Pop-Up Book of Celebrity Meltdowns puts you front and center as ten of the most spectacular public crack-ups of our day unfold before your eyes. Open the page to trigger a wardrobe malfuntion and watch as Janet Jackson bares all at the Super Bowl . . . Pull the tab and see Tom Cruise leap up on Oprah’s couch like an excited puppy . . . From the aerial view of a news copter, watch as a phalanx of squad cars pursues O. J. Simpson’s Bronco in slow motion. . . .

READ Posters

Remember when your favorite sitcom aired a clip show? Boy was that annoying.

Here at the Charlotte Law Library News Blog we are looking back at the past year as we celebrate our one year anniversary in the blogosphere. Today we’re featuring the READ posters. These posters, inspired by the American Library Association’s Read campaign, feature the favorite books of library staff, faculty and students at Charlotte Law. Many more posters will be featured during the year so check back and catch them all.

Blue Like Jazz

Life of Pi

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

The Awakening

The Digital Person  

-Tom Hemstock-

Life of Pi – Nothing to do with Math

Liz McCurry, Electronic Resources/Reference Librarian

The Life of Pi / Yann Martel

I remember reading this book years ago, and it has never left my list of  my top 3 favorite books (even with the emergence of the Twilight series).  The reader follows a young boy through his religious journey where he questions his Hinduism heritage with practices of Christianity and Islam. Ultimately, a shipwreck brings to light those answers he was seeking.  Pi, the main character of the story is just a small boy, but takes the reader through his 200+ days at sea by describing the wildly imaginative experiences with vivid intensity.   Make sure to read the book from front to back because the ending has a twist that will make you question everything.

Synopsis

The peripatetic Pi (the much-taunted Piscine) Patel spends a beguiling boyhood in Pondicherry, India, as the son of a zookeeper. Growing up beside the wild beasts, Pi gathers an encyclopedic knowledge of the animal world. His curious mind also makes the leap from his native Hinduism to Christianity and Islam, all three of which he practices with joyous abandon. In his 16th year, Pi sets sail with his family and some of their menagerie to start a new life in Canada. Halfway to Midway Island, the ship sinks into the Pacific, leaving Pi stranded on a life raft with a hyena, an orangutan, an injured zebra and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. After the beast dispatches the others, Pi is left to survive for 227 days with his large feline companion on the 26-foot-long raft, using all his knowledge, wits and faith to keep himself alive. The scenes flow together effortlessly, and the sharp observations of the young narrator keep the tale brisk and engaging. Martel’s potentially unbelievable plot line soon demolishes the reader’s defenses, cleverly set up by events of young Pi’s life that almost naturally lead to his biggest ordeal.

BBC’s Top 100

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books listed below.

How do your reading habits stack up?

How many of these books have you read?

Which is your favorite?

-Brian Trippodo-

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Mere Christianity – CS Lewis
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Illiad – Homer
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov x
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 A Tree Grows in Brooklynn – Betty Smith
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Stay Sharp During Summer: READ

Ah, summer.  A time of no more school, no more books, etc.  We wait for it all year, as Thomas Carlyle reminds us:  “Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.”

It is a time for many things—rest, fun, travel—but for some people, summer is a time for reading.  But what to read?  Here are some web sites that offer stimulating yet satisfying content.

http://www.dailylit.com – Register for this site and get entire books e-mailed to you, one installment at a time.  Some books are free in their entirety; others offer free excerpts before payment (often as little as $6.99) is needed.  You can search for books that interest you, or you can browse by title, author, or category.  Want to learn more?  Check out the site’s FAQ page.

http://aldaily.com – Arts & Letters Daily is a collection of “the best writing on the Web.”  Using a simple three-column format, the site summarizes and links to book reviews, essays, and opinion pieces covering philosophy, literature, language, culture, history, art, and more.

A section called Favorites links to other interesting sites, such as Overlawyered, a blog about “the high cost of our legal system.”

http://www.mentalfloss.com – Mental Floss is “where knowledge junkies get their fix.”  Articles deal with mostly scientific and historical topics, and they are written in an accessible, entertaining style.

The site also has quizzes (my favorite:  Ripped from Headlines or Plot from Scooby-Doo?), trivia, a blog, and the Amazing Fact Generator, from which I learned that only half a dolphin’s brain sleeps at one time.  (The other, awake half makes the dolphin go up for air to prevent drowning.)

-Anthony Aycock-

Introducing the CSL Library’s READ Poster Project to the World

This past April, the CharlotteLaw Library Technical Services team embarked on the phenomenal task of creating our very own READ posters .  We chose this project in order to celebrate our library, our patrons, and reading (outside of those legal, or lethal, case books).  By featuring our posters in the upcoming weeks and months, we hope that you will get to know the CharlotteLaw Library Team little better.

Our fearless leader, Bobbie’s 2009 READ Poster

The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age / Daniel J. Solove

I chose this book for the READ poster because many of us do not realize that the digital dossiers we create every day when we apply for new credit, shop on-line, or use our cell phones encroach on privacy in very significant ways.  I believe that The Digital Person is a must read for law students and professors because of the timely information it supplies about spyware, web bugs, data mining, the USA-Patriot Act, and many other types of privacy assaults.

Synopsis

Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, electronic databases are compiling information about you. As you surf the Internet, an unprecedented amount of your personal information is being recorded and preserved forever in the digital minds of computers. For each individual, these databases create a profile of activities, interests, and preferences used to investigate backgrounds, check credit, market products, and make a wide variety of decisions affecting our lives. The creation and use of these databases—which Daniel J. Solove calls “digital dossiers”—has thus far gone largely unchecked.  In this startling account of new technologies for gathering and using personal data, Solove explains why digital dossiers pose a grave threat to our privacy.