New S&V titles June 1st

CDs this week include an earthy gem from The Eastern called Hope and Wire, plus these:
Willie Nelson - Heroes, Home Brew - Home Brew, Zowie - Love Demolition, the Best of SIA, M.Ward - A Wasteland Companion, All-American Rejects - Kids in the Street, Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull) - Thick as a Brick 2, Dr. John - Locked Down (link coming soon!), and the ultra-crazy-funky Bombay Royale with You Me Bullets Love.

DVDs this week include the fourth season of True Blood (also available on Blu-Ray), plus The Descendants, Bang Bang Club, the French movie Point Blank, the third series of Being Human, the second series of Hung, and a DVD by the King's Singers called Christmas.

Scarily exciting! A book on One Direction called Dare to Dream! Plus Top of the Rock : the Rise and Fall of Must-See TV, a musical score Anthology of Fleetwood Mac, and a book of songs for musical theatre Auditions.

S&V titles 25 May 2012

Two great Kiwi CDs: take a bluesy psychedelic trip with Beneath the Crystal Palace by Dictaphone Blues, and a mellow electronic journey with Imagineering by Module. That's right - the same Module (aka Jeramiah Ross) who used to live in Palmy!

Also on display this week are: Some Nights by Fun, Moving Up, Living Down by Eric Hutchinson, Florence+The Machine's MTV Unplugged, Port of Morrow by The Shins, The Return of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook!!!by Elvis Costello, and a band that featured on the soundtrack to the Hunger Games, Punch Brothers with their album Who’s feeling young now?

I'm sure there'll be a lot of people happy to hear that we have just received the English-language version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. It's on Blu-Ray too!

Another big title is Breaking Dawn, part 1, from the Twilight series. Also on Blu-Ray.

Other titles are The Hunter (Willem Dafoe), Shanghai (John Cusack), season two of The Big C, season four of Go Girls, plus the long-awaited TV adaptation of Pillars of the Earth, featuring that naughty man Ian McShane. Well, his character is pretty naughty - I don't know what McShane's like in real life...

Finally, RIP Duck Dunn. A truly great musician, his bass playing graced so many famous recordings.

Code by Charles Petzold

No! Wait! Don't focus on that bit in the title that says 'Computer Hardware and Software'. This isn't really a computer book. It's a book for people like me who loved science but didn't follow fast enough at school. I used to wish I had a friend living next door in the '80s so we would have had a reason to learn Morse code, and communicate clandestinely after lights out. Now, I wonder things like how the braille on lift buttons works. In other words, this is a book for the eternally curious which really does what it claims to do - explain things that we all think are terribly complicated in an easy to understand way. I loved this so much I bought an eBook version so I can re-read bits of it wherever I am. Five Stars!

Code by Charles Petzold Computers-Non Fiction Zone

New S&V titles, 18 May 2012

The quintessentially British spy thriller "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" is out now on DVD and also a Blu-Ray version.

Also on the New Display: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Immortals, the TV miniseries of Titanic (also on Blu-Ray), and the Blu-Ray version of the epic Game of Thrones : season one. Winter is coming!

On the book front, we have Greil Marcus' The Doors, Mel Bay's Intro to Polyrhythms, the music score for Rihanna's Loud, and a Left-handed Bass Guitar Chord Chart.

CD-wise we have a genre-mashing mix: Rufus Wainwright's Out of the Game, Die Antwoord's Ten$ion, Chick Corea's Orvieto, Ruthie Foster's Let It Burn, and Dirty Three's Toward the Low Sun.

New Sound & Vision titles 11 May 2012

This week our new DVDs include Lars Von Trier's Melancholia, the Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady, the spooky thriller The Caller, the heartwarming first series of Heartbeat, and the sumptuous collection The best of Jane Austen.

On the CD front we have Air's Le voyage dans la Lune, Train's California 37, Suzanne Prentice's I'll Do It All Over Again, Soulfly's Enslaved, Tetzlaff's Violin Concertos, Jack White's Blunderbuss, and jazzy Keith Jarrett's Rio.

Learn the bluesy tunes from Hugh Laurie's Let Them Talk with this music score for piano, vocal and guitar.

Also out this week: The Acoustic Guitar Hit Collection, and Back to Black : plus 19 top hits.

Favourite things in the Library: Wisden Cricketer

Favourite things in the Library: Wisden Cricketer,

The Cricket season is sadly over so this little librarian must make do with reading the worlds best Cricket mag - Wisden Cricketer!

At work today...

My favourite wall :)

Staff Picks: Focus magazine

Ahhhh, I love Focus magazine. I had always thought I would study science at school but was bitterly disappointed to discover I was fairly awful at Maths and didn't understand my Chemistry, Physics or Biology classes. So I switched to the humanities and a History degree and library career happily followed. Now I love reading Focus magazine due to its pithy, clear articles on various topics in the world of science. I usually start with the Q&A section for the quick fire answers to common 'How come?' questions, then move on to the more in-depth articles.Who would've thought I'd be able to grasp the basics of antimatter? Erm...at least I did when I read the article!

Focus Magazine on the Staff Pics Wall: Palmerston North City Library: First Floor

You can find the latest issue (and back copies) on the First Floor at the City Library. Visit our Non-fiction desk and ask for the Science and Technology magazines area.