The Second Floor Librarians

On Thursday, September 8, at 7:00 pm, the library is excited to present Visions of Home: a Reading and Discussion with Marjorie Sandor, George Estreich, and Charles Goodrich.

For the past  week or two, the media has been talking about a new book, called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, by Amy Chua. (Read the NY Times review here.) This got me thinking about other nonfiction books that have sparked debate in the past. Here are a couple of controversial nonfiction titles (and [...]

Looking back on the top memoirs and biographies is always interesting, as we see the lives and the themes that captured our attention. If you’re interested, compare it to 2009′s top biographies. But let’s get to the books you voted as the most popular by checking them out with your library cards! Here they are…

Looking at our blog stats, I see that our recent Eat, Pray, Love read-alikes post has been  far and away our most popular lately. While I haven’t read the book, it seems to involve a fair amount of traveling and eating. So, since summer is a great time to travel and a good time to [...]

Happy new year! The City of Corvallis’ fiscal new year begins July 1st. Before the current fiscal year ends we often run reports on our collections. Using these statistics, I put together a list of the twenty most popular biographies and memoirs for July 2009 – July 2010.

As we head toward the end of the year, all the “Best of 2009″ lists start coming out. You’ll find all sorts of best books of the year lists online, but here’s something uniquely Corvallis – a list of the memoirs and biographies you thought were best this year. I generated this list by running [...]

Although the film Julie and Julia did not inspire me to make 536 recipes in 365 days, it did get me thinking about cookbooks.  I asked Carrie, our cookbook selector, for a short list of other classic cookbooks that people might want to check out while they are waiting for Julia’s classic, Mastering the Art [...]