Updates to OverDrive

Good news, everyone! OverDrive, the company that manages our downloadable eBooks and audiobooks, has informed us that our website will transition to their new interface sometime within the first half of March. Their Next Generation website is designed to make it simpler to find and check out books and from what we've seen they've done a great job of it!

We don't anticipate any heartbreak or confusion resulting from the changeover, but if you want to have a peek at what to expect you can watch this video from OverDrive or have a look at this website from a library in Ohio that has already been updated.

If anything in the new site doesn't work as you expect it to, please give us a call or stop by the Reference Desk!

Friday Grab Bag: Award Nominees

We're putting the final touches on a new project that some might call madness, and we'll have all the details for you next week. We didn't want to leave you without a Friday post, so we're pulling together a list of titles that are up for one award or another!

First up The Oscars! The 85th annual Academy Awards will be presented this weekend on Sunday, February 24th. ABC has a full list of the nominees on their website, and many of the films are available for check out through Carnegie-Stout. Of course, many of the nominees are based on books that are also available for check out!

• The Pirates! in an Adventure with Napoleon by Gideo Defoe, part of the series which inspired The Pirates! Band of Misfits nominated for Best Animated Feature Film
• Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, the inspiration for Lincoln with twelve nominations
• The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick, the film of the same name has eight nominations
• Argo: how the CIA and Hollywood pulled off the most audacious rescue in history by Antonio Mendez & Matt Baglio ties in with the film Argo, which has seven nominations
•  The adaptation of Life of Pi by Yann Martel has eleven nominations
• Les Miserables, based on the classic by Victor Hugo, has eight nominations
• The Hobbit: an unexpected journey, the first of three movies based on Tolkien's classic has three nominations
• Kon-Tiki based on Thor Heyerdahl's adventure memoir is a nominee for Best Foreign Feature
• The latest film of Anna Karenina based on the classic by Leo Tolstoy has four nominations

The long list for the second annual Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction were announced this month. This award is selected by the American Library Association, and will be awarded on June 30th during the annual convention. You can check out the whole list by following this link. Staff of Carnegie-Stout have reviewed two titles from the long list here on the blog: Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver and Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo.

The nominee list for the 2012 Nebula Awards were also announced this week. This award is given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. The winners will be announced on May 18th, which gives you enough time to check out all of the nominees for Best Novel (all of which are available at Carnegie-Stout):

• Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed
• Ironskin by Tina Connolly
• The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin
• The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan
• Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal
• 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Be sure to check back next Friday to learn about the first ever Dubuque Tournament of Books (or stop by the Recommendations Desk to learn more)!

Aya: Life in Yop City by Marguerite Abouet & Clément Oubrerie

If you've read about the Côte d'Ivoire, or Ivory Coast, in the past twenty years, it was likely a story about political and economic turmoil. In fact, wars, famines, and epidemic disease tend to be the only stories about Africa we see reported. Marguerite Abouet objected to this one-dimensional portrayal, and was inspired to write Aya: Life in Yop City.

The setting is the late 1970s, during a period of economic prosperity following Ivory Coast's independence from France in 1960. Yop City is a local nickname for Yopougon, a middle-class suburb of the capital city, Abidjan. The story itself is very character-driven, centered around the lives and loves of three teenaged girls, Aya, Adjoua, and Bintou, and their families.

This is the world of Abouet's childhood; she was born in Abidjan and her family lived in Yopougon. When she was 12, her family moved to France, where she still lives today. Aya is her first published work, and I'm far from the only person to think it's wonderful. The series has been nominated for numerous awards, and won the Angoulême International Comics Festival Prize for First Comic Book in 2006 (think a much larger Comic-Con).

I'm not quite sure what caused me to pick this book up in the first place. I suspect it was a review I read somewhere, but I know the gorgeous orange dress on the cover was a major factor in my checking this book out. In fact, the hardest part of writing this review is resisting the urge to just page through admiring the beautiful art. The characters are expressive and distinctive, but its the color that really brings everything to life.

Marguerite Abouet's partner Clément Oubrerie is the illustrator, and his background as an animator is evident in the characters' poses and the way the camera moves around a scene.  Not having read the original French, I can't say much about Helge Dascher's translation except that it doesn't read like a translation.

And if nothing else, I can highly recommend checking out the bonus section at the end. Beyond an author interview and glossary of Ivorian terms, there are cultural notes, recipes, and fashion advice given by the characters themselves! This is definitely a book that I'll be adding to my own personal collection.

~Sarah, Adult Services