The Alibi

I read The Alibi by Sandra Brown.  This is the first book by her that I’ve read, though she’s a pretty popular mystery author.  I actually read an excerpt of it in a magazine many years ago, and it stuck in my head-so when I saw it on the recreational reading shelf, I knew I had to check it out! It’s set in a very sultry Charleston, South Carolina and opens with the murder of wealthy, sleazy real estate magnate, Lute Pettijohn.  Hammond Cross is the young attorney of sterling character and pedigree, who hopes to use the case to cement his ascent to lead prosecutor.  (We learn that in South Carolina, “County Solicitor” is the correct term, in place of “District Attorney”).  Brown weaves together a tangled web of over-the-top Southern characters.  There are intersecting love triangles involving Hammond Cross, his cut-throat professional rival, Pettijohn’s drunken socialite widow, and the obsessive investigating detective.  But the story’s real tension revolves around “the alibi”-Hammond’s rendezvous with a mysterious stranger, who becomes the prime suspect in the Pettijohn case.  And neither she nor he, are about to reveal their relationship.  It’s a legal ethics minefield and probably pretty far-fetched, but I still found The Alibi to be absorbing and exciting. Pick it up to enjoy over the last weekend of summer!

Tristram Shandy

I finished Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, another one of my TBR 2008 Challenge books.  This is often hailed as the first post-modern text, and a few years ago, I saw a film adaptation A Cock and Bull Story, which I found to be a lot of fun.  So I was quite looking forward to this.  It’s a (very) rambling story where the narrator recounts his birth-paying particular attention to circumstances surrounding his conception, his father, and his uncle Toby.  Sterne has no compunction about breaking off a chapter, just as it’s about to reach a resolution.  It’s a narrative of interruptions, and so it requires a good deal of focus to follow the novel’s train(s) of thought.  Have any of you read it? What did you think? 

2008 Olympics

Has anyone been watching the Olympics?  Which sports do you like best?  I’ve been enjoying watching these Olympic games.  I really liked the opening ceremonies, but I’ve always been an easy mark for big pageantry and production numbers.  I like watching basketball, swimming and gymnastics, and I’m looking forward to seeing more tennis and soccer.  I also hope to get a chance to see some of the less-broadcast sports like equestrian events, badminton, archery and the pentathlon.  On the IOC’s website I also learned about Olympic sports of the past, including polo, rugby and tug-of-war, which I would have liked to watch!  As any broadcast is also jam-packed with advertising, my favorite Olympic commercial so far, has been this one.  And I’d say my favorite Olympic film is the classic Chariots of Fire, which is available at Snell.

Learning to love the tag cloud?

I was searching the Old Colony Library Network catalog today and for the first time I kind of “got” the cloud display.  It’s not actually supposed to work like facets, it’s sort of the opposite of facets.  Facets help you narrow your search, and the tag cloud expands it. Then I experimented with other libraries that use tag clouds.  The same searches bring up different word clouds in each library.  Sometimes the associations seem weird but hey, if those words are linked in your catalog, why not suggest them to the user? I also see where tag clouds can compensate for the shortcomings of topic facets (“Refine”), which seem to be based on LC subjects.    The tag clouds allow you to bust out of the LC subject framework.  It’s like if someone comes to the library reference desk and asks for something using an incorrect or unfamiliar term–the tag cloud tries to imagine what possible relationship that term might have to something that’s actually in the library. Remember the mean librarian in Sophie’s Choice who humiliates Sophie and sends her away for asking for poetry books by “Emil Dickens”?  Well, with a tag cloud, Sophie might have been able to find it. (Of course then she never would have met Nathan… or Stingo…but on the other hand, that might have worked out better for her in the long run…) Maybe that explains why so many public libraries are choosing to display tag clouds? And maybe when people are researching interdisciplinary topics, the tag cloud might help expand their vocabulary into unfamiliar areas? I know it is popular to make fun of tag clouds, and I have been guilty of that myself.  But they are fun, once you let go of the notion that they are supposed to help you find a particular item, and instead allow yourself to be inspired to use the web catalog as a way of wandering through the collections. That’s what happened to me with the Old Colony Library.  Try it! (navigator.ocln.org) Karen Merguerian

Pillow Talk

One of my childhood friends really loved the movie Pillow Talk, but I’d never actually seen it until I checked it out from the Library last week.  I found it to be a lot of fun and I really enjoyed it.  It’s about a young career woman, Jan, (played by Doris Day) who shares a ‘party line’ (basically a phone line) with lothario composer Brad (played by Rock Hudson).   Phone lines are so scarce that Jan can’t get her own, and Brad continues to hog the line, singing “original” tribute songs to different women.  Eventually the two meet, and Brad adopts the persona of Texan Rex Stetson in order to woo Jan.  The movie seemed to be a little risqué for the 1950s, and I think it’s still a pretty clever romantic comedy.