Local artist Derek Cooper will be appearing at the Phillips Village Branch of the BROOKLYNATI PUBLIC LIBRARY to give a short talk about his life as a performing artist in Brooklynati. He will also be giving an inside look at how he came to create his newest work, The One Man Show, which will be premiering at Brooklynati's Grand Finale Theater as part of the Brooklynati Internation Arts Festival.
Free to the public. 2pm.

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MONDAY:

The ELUCID Branch of BROOKLYNATI PUBLIC LIBRARY hosts a magical journey for kids and parents with their weekly group reading session.  Childrens classics from Seuss to Sendak are shared complete with props and children are invited to participate. 

Free to the public. 1pm.

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TUESDAY:

Come experience the beautiful sounds of the Brooklynati Opera. They will be previewing pieces from next season's show at the South Side Branch of the BROOKLYNATI PUBLIC LIBRARY as part of the BPL Noontime Concert series.
Free to the public. 12pm.

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WEDNESDAY:

Pastor Tiggalo gives short lectures at the South Side Branch of the BROOKLYNATI PUBLIC LIBRARY on the Bible as Literature, discussing some of the most recent scholarship, and putting the works in their proper historical context. Anyone with an interest in history, literature, or religion is encouraged to attend.
Free to the public. 6:30pm.

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THURSDAY:

Meetings of the Brooklynatic Book Club take place every Thursday evening at all branches of the BROOKLYNATI PUBLIC LIBRARY. All book lovers are encouraged to attend as we discuss the book of the month. Light snacks and refreshments will be served during the meetings.
Free to the public. 6:30pm

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The Brooklynati Public Library is pleased to offer our members a free BPL Book Club!  Meeting every Thursday night, the book club discusses relevent literary works.  Here's the schedule for 2009:

JANUARY: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
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One of Chinua Achebe's many achievements in his acclaimed first novel, Things Fall Apart, is his relentlessly unsentimental rendering of Nigerian tribal life before and after the coming of colonialism. First published in 1958, just two years before Nigeria declared independence from Great Britain, the book eschews the obvious temptation of depicting pre-colonial life as a kind of Eden. Instead, Achebe sketches a world in which violence, war, and suffering exist, but are balanced by a strong sense of tradition, ritual, and social coherence. His Ibo protagonist, Okonkwo, is a self-made man. The son of a charming ne'er-do-well, he has worked all his life to overcome his father's weakness and has arrived, finally, at great prosperity and even greater reputation among his fellows in the village of Umuofia. Okonkwo is a champion wrestler, a prosperous farmer, husband to three wives and father to several children.

FEBRUARY: High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
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It has been said often enough that baby boomers are a television generation, but the very funny novel High Fidelity reminds that in a way they are the record-album generation as well. This funny novel is obsessed with music; Hornby's narrator is an early-thirtysomething English guy who runs a London record store. He sells albums recorded the old-fashioned way--on vinyl--and is having a tough time making other transitions as well, specifically adulthood. The book is in one sense a love story, both sweet and interesting; most entertaining, though, are the hilarious arguments over arcane matters of pop music.

MARCH: Check The Technique by Brian Coleman
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It’s a sad fact: hip-hop album liners have always been reduced to a list of producer and sample credits, a publicity photo or two, and some hastily composed shout-outs. That’s a damn shame, because few outside the game know about the true creative forces behind influential masterpieces like PE’s It Takes a Nation of Millions. . ., De La’s 3 Feet High and Rising, and Wu-Tang’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). A longtime scribe for the hip-hop nation, Brian Coleman fills this void, and delivers a thrilling, knockout oral history of the albums that define this dynamic and iconoclastic art form.

APRIL: The Broke Girl Diaries by Angela Nissel
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The Internet has been around long enough as a venue for works like the diary presented here, which debuted online, for such works to have lost some of their mystique. Still, Nissel deserves her moment in the sun. As a struggling college student at the University of Pennsylvania, she decided that to keep her mind off her empty stomach, she would keep a journal of her days and post it on the Net. The result is a series of biting, funny entries about the evil atmosphere of check-cashing offices, the horror of being two cents short for the grocery bill and the joys of making friends who buy dinner. Her wry thoughts about being flat broke will appeal to readers who enjoyed Bridget Jones's exploits and similarly sparky works. Nissel is no fictional Bridget, however, obsessing about weight and cigarettes. She's a city girl who knows the exact price of ramen noodles and the pain of counting pennies. Although she occasionally recycles material, she rants with aplomb, using colorful anecdotes (her elderly landlord comes for the rent and ends up falling asleep on the couch) to pull the reader further into her impoverished reality. She doesn't delve into the actual fear and pain associated with poverty, but views her time of hunger with amusement, like a financial misadventure that she always knew would end. Charming and sharp, Nissel's diary will be relished by anyone who's ever been a student and remembers those ramen noodles. (Apr.)Forecast: Already a palpable presence on okayplayer.com, a hip-hop Web site she cofounded that receives 500,000 visitors a day, Nissel has a solid base constituency. With a blurb from Chris Rock, a five-city author tour, stickering campaigns in several key cities and a low cover price, this paperback original is poised for success.

MAY: Choke by Chuck Palahniuk
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Victor Mancini is a ruthless con artist. Victor Mancini is a med-school dropout who's taken a job playing an Irish indentured servant in a colonial-era theme park in order to help care for his Alzheimer's-afflicted mother. Victor Mancini is a sex addict. Victor Mancini is a direct descendant of Jesus Christ. All of these statements about the protagonist of Choke are more or less true. Welcome, once again, to the world of Chuck Palahniuk. Whether this is the novel that will break Palahniuk into the mainstream is hard to say. For a fourth book, in fact, the ratio of iffy, "dude"-intensive dialogue to interesting and insightful passages is a little higher than we might wish. In the end, though, the author's nerve and daring pull the whole thing off--just barely. And what's next for Victor Mancini's creator? Leave the last word to him, declaring as he does in the final pages: "Maybe it's our job to invent something better.... What it's going to be, I don't know."

JUNE: No Reservations by Anthony Bourdain
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Bourdain's enthusiasm is so intense that it practically explodes off the page. Bourdain shows himself to be one of the country's best food writers. His opinions are as strong as his language, and his tastes as infectious as his joy. “[Bourdain writes] the kind of book you read in one sitting, then rush about annoying your coworkers by declaiming whole passages.”—New York magazine " Zany antics aside, No Reservations amply reflects Bourdain’s search for the heart and soul of humanity—and, of course, the ultimate roast pig."—BookPage "More than leftovers of his show (now in its fourth season), this is a fresh, satisfying meal...with lavish new photos and commentary."—Booklist "delivers another entertaining look at the best and worst places around the world in which to eat... Bourdain also provides many of his always incisive and entertaining observations"—Publisher's Weekly

JULY: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
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Best known for his Border Trilogy, hailed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "an American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century," Cormac McCarthy has written ten rich and often brutal novels, including the bestselling No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose, The Road is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we've read this year, but in case you need a second (and expert) opinion, we asked Dennis Lehane, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his glowing review below. --Daphne Durham

AUGUST: The Guns Of August by Barbara W. Tuchman
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It is seldom that a book combining at once such valuable historical material with such an excellent literary style comes along. This book, recounting the political events leading up to the first World War and the first horrible 30 days of that War, is such a work. Beginning with the pompous, colorful funeral of England's Edward VII in May of 1910 - -which was to prove the end of the old European order - -the account reaches back into the growing competitive situation between England and Germany. It examines briefly but quite carefully the changes since Victoria's time - -the power intrigues, Germany's thirst for power, England's constant incircling of her. Thus, with the immortal assassination of Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914, the martial stage is set. What followed (and again it is reported with succinct, vivid accuracy) was the horrible carnage which is modern war. The author shows how Germany planned its Belgian campaign, how General Foch developed a whole new military "mystique" to meet it, how Turkey, Russia, and Japan became involved, and how men began to die on the Western Front between Germany and France by the tens of thousands. Through the pages too move the great figures - -Generals Molke, Joffre, Foch, and Hindenburg; Winston Churchill, Lord Kitchener, Admirals Jellico and von Tirpitz, and dozens more. Concluding with the great Battle of the Marne which saved Paris and turned the Germans back, the volume shows how European and then world history was forever changed by the terrible struggle. It is an exciting interpretation, and Book of the Month Club selection is the first salvo.

SEPTEMBER: Dreams Of My Father by Barack Obama
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Obama argues with himself on almost every page of this lively autobiographical conversation. He gets you to agree with him, and then he brings in a counternarrative that seems just as convincing. Son of a white American mother and of a black Kenyan father whom he never knew, Obama grew up mainly in Hawaii. After college, he worked for three years as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side. Then, finally, he went to Kenya, to find the world of his dead father, his "authentic" self. Will the truth set you free, Obama asks? Or will it disappoint? Both, it seems. His search for himself as a black American is rooted in the particulars of his daily life; it also reads like a wry commentary about all of us. He dismisses stereotypes of the "tragic mulatto" and then shows how much we are all caught between messy contradictions and disparate communities. He discovers that Kenya has 400 different tribes, each of them with stereotypes of the others. Obama is candid about racism and poverty and corruption, in Chicago and in Kenya. Yet he does find community and authenticity, not in any romantic cliche{‚}, but with "honest, decent men and women who have attainable ambitions and the determination to see them through."

OCTOBER: The Piano Shop On The Left Bank by Thad Carhart
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In this engaging memoir, an American writer living in Paris recounts his experiences in a piano shop tucked into an out-of-the way street on the rive gauche. Because the elderly proprietor refuses to admit strangers to the atelier where he repairs, rebuilds and sells used pianos to select customers, Carhart does not at first get in. But with an introduction from another client and the help of the owner's younger assistant and heir apparent, Luc, Carhart is finally welcomed into a magical space crowded with pianos of all makes and vintages. Soon he becomes one of the favored insiders who stop by nearly every day to gossip and talk about pianos with Luc. Luc's love of pianos is so infectious that Carhart's own childhood passion for the instrument is rekindled. He starts to take lessons again and buys a piano for his small apartment, a purchase that takes some time, for Luc, who regards a piano as a member of a family, prides himself on finding instruments compatible with his customers. Caught up in Luc's zeal, Carhart immerses himself in the history and mechanics of the piano, and he includes chapters on the craft of piano making, the instrument's development over the centuries and the fine points of tuning. In his renewed fascination, he reflects on piano teachers, those of his childhood as well as several renowned teachers of today. Carhart conveys his affection for Luc, the atelier and the piano with such enthusiasm that readers might be inspired to return to their own childhood instrument. At the very least, they will enjoy this warmhearted, intelligent insight into a private Paris.

NOVEMBER: Where'd You Get Those? by Bobbito Garcia
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"Before Nike controlled nearly half of the global sneaker market" and "before yuppies started wearing sneakers with their suits to walk to and from work," sneaker culture was the province of "sneaker fiends" and ball players, Garcia declares in his paean to the lost golden age of streetwise footwear. A cultural critic, journalist and DJ, Garcia waxes nostalgic-in slang, of course-about "the most seminal and coveted joints" from the 1960s through 1987. For each model, Garcia shares color combinations, nicknames, relevant athlete endorsements and quips from fans on each sneaker's pros and cons. With photographs of basketball players on the court and kids breakdancing on city sidewalks, advertisements for Jordache (with Earl "The Pearl" Monroe pitching, "Go One-On-One With... the Jordache Look"), and up-close shots of classic shoes like the Nike Air Force 1 and the Converse All Star, this is a comprehensive, informative study of shoe culture, as well as a hip tribute to icons like Larry Bird, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Ivan Lendl.

DECEMBER: The Christmas Sweater by Glenn Beck
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In Beck's debut novel, the conservative radio and TV host (An Inconvenient Book) makes a weak attempt at a holiday classic in the vein of It's a Wonderful Life. Despite his single mother's financial hardships, 12-year-old Eddie is certain this Christmas he will receive his much-desired Huffy bike. To his dismay, what he finds under the tree is "a stupid, handmade, ugly sweater" that his mother carefully modeled after those she can't afford at Sears (one of four places she keeps part-time jobs). Eddie tosses the sweater and insults his mother before the two go visit his grandparents at their farmouse. On the drive home, though, Eddie's exhausted mother falls asleep at the wheel and crashes, dying instantly. Sent to live with his grandparents, an increasingly bitter and angry Eddie lashes out at his accommodating guardians, engages in typical teenage angst and grapples with belief in God. For all his focus on traditional family virtues like respect, love and forgiveness, Beck's lightweight parable cruises on predictability, repetition and sentimentality.