Hi everyone!

I’m going to make an effort to post the titles of new books that we add to the McNaughton leisure reading collection. Each month we order about 20 new books, and they usually arrive a few at a time. It’s always a fun time for us here in the library — after all, what could be more exciting than new books! 

Yesterday we received six new titles. They are:

Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (winner of the Booker Prize)
Matchless: A Christmas Story by Gregory Maguire
Going Away Shoes by Jill McCorkle
Family Album by Penelope Lively
The Sandman: The Dream Hunters by Neil Gaiman & P. Craig Russell

Enjoy!

–Amanda

They aren’t the kind of masks that you’d normally associate with Halloween, but they are bright, colorful, and worth seeing! Children from Longfellow Elementary, a school neighboring the Augustana campus, created the beautiful assortment of African masks now on display on second floor of the library.

And while you’re here, be sure to check out the ominous candy box and friendly ghost located near Circulation!

I don’t read graphic novels. I just don’t. However, I came across this book and the premise was so intriguing — and it got such good reviews — that I had to take a look. I am SO glad I did. This book is STUNNING.

It is the true story of a man’s lonely, confusing, bizarre childhood in Detroit. His father was a doctor and gave him hundreds of experimental x-ray treatments, presumably to help his son’s sinus infections. They ended up causing cancer. His mother was a bitter, harsh woman incapable of showing love and nurture to her sons. She struggled with mental illness and physical problems of her own.

In this book, a picture truly tells a thousand words. Small’s depictions of his family and childhood memories are absolutely haunting. His drawings capture so much raw emotion. Seeing the dreary, traumatic world of a stark, unloving home through the eyes of Small’s child was immensely powerful and moving.

Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.

–Amanda

The library will be open extended hours during 10th and Finals week. Happy studying!
End of Term Hours

 Wythe and Quinn Anderson (sons of Special Collections Librarian Jamie Nelson) ransacked the campus on Saturday in their viking gear.  Jamie knit their viking hats especially for Homecoming, and they both happen to have blue and gold shirts.

October 19-23 marks the first international open access week. What is open access?  According to openaccessweek.org, it’s “the principle that all research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication.” It emphasizes the unrestricted sharing of research results and the importance of access to these results for all. To find out more about open access, visit http://www.openaccessweek.org/.

October is Illinois Archives Month, celebrated as part of American Archives Month. Each October, archival institutions set aside some time to celebrate the vast array of historical materials they hold and to invite the public to become more aware of their local archives. The Illinois State Archives produces a poster that is distributed free to the nearly 400 archival repositories in the state, including college and university, library, corporate, and non-profit archives. Augustana College’s Special Collections is proud to have a photo from our collection featured in the poster again this year. Our contributed photo is of a steamboat on the Mississippi River at Rock Island, taken in 1941 by John Henry Hauberg.

Visit our web site (http://www.augustana.edu/library/SpecialCollections/home.html) to learn more about our archival collections, or stop in and see for yourself, Monday-Friday, 1-5 pm.

Profoundly deaf since age 4, Josh Swiller, a graduate of Yale University, served in Zambia in the Peace Corps for two years in the mid-1990s where he encountered both acceptance as a deaf man and resistance as an outsider trying to improve living conditions. He wrote a book about his experience there: The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa. In 2005, Josh received a cochlear implant so that his hearing is now 100%. Since his experience in Africa, Josh has undertaken a variety of jobs: forest ranger in the California Redwoods, sheepskin slipper craftsman and salesman, Zen monk, raw food chef, and hospice social worker. He currently works at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., is developing a nonprofit foundation that serves the deaf in developing countries, and is writing a novel. We are excited to have Josh Swiller on campus Tuesday afternoon and Thursday morning when he will deliver the convocation address.  He will also be visiting St. Ambrose University, giving an address for the public Wednesday evening in the Rogalski Center at 7:00 p.m.

Students in Religion 207: The Bible in America, with Dr. Sara Moslener, will have bibles on display in the library on Friday, October 2. This class focuses on bibles as cultural artifacts; participants have been researching all term to learn about the printing, marketing, historical context and intended audience of bibles of their choosing, which range from old family bibles to recently published ones. Come visit the exhibit on Tredway Library’s 2^nd floor to see what your classmates and students have discovered about their bibles!

Some poems have perfect posture, as if hanging by
filaments from the sky.
Those poems walk like dancers,
noiselessly.

Poet, novelist, and prose writer James Galvin will be the next guest in The River Readings at Augustana, on Thursday, October 1 at 7:00 p.m. in Wallenberg Hall.  A member of the faculty at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, Galvin is the author of seven volumes of poetry, most recently As Is; a novel, Fencing the Sky; and a prose work The Meadow, Galvin has won numerous awards including a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Foundation Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Galvin ranches half the year in Wyoming.

**Samples of Galvin’s work on Moodle: Library/River Readings**