Guardian First Book Award Longlist

Book prize list spans centuries and species by John Ezard, Thursday August 24, 2006
The Guardian
'Vigorous, engaged and elegant' works on longlist
Shortlist for Guardian award due in November

The contenders

Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living
Carrie Tiffany, above (Picador), fiction

Harbor
Lorraine Adams (Portobello), fiction

John Donne: The Reformed Soul
John Stubbs (Viking), biography

Lonesome George: The Lives and Loves of a Conservation Icon
Henry Nicholls (Palgrave Macmillan), natural history

A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveller
Jason Roberts (Simon & Schuster), biography

Running for the Hills
Horatio Clare (John Murray), memoir

Poppy Shakespeare
Clare Allan (Bloomsbury), fiction

Waiting for the Night-Rowers
Roger Moulson (Enitharmon), poetry

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
Yiyun Li (4th Estate), stories

In the Country of Men
Hisham Matar (Viking), fiction

VALA Conference

Two library staff members went to the VALA Conference in Melbourne this year.

They have posted comments on the sessions they attended.

The Sopranos

The new series of popular HBO mafia series "The Sopranos" has started on Wednesdays 9.30pm TV2.

One of the hallmarks of this programme is the use of music on the soundtrack. They play some very interesting music. The Library has two soundtracks as well as a cookbook and some guides to the series.

Making the most of your digital life

My favourite magazine, Wired, has a great pull-out this month entitled "HowTo: a step-by-step guide to making the most of your digital life" which we think is great because it fits so well with our own feature Get a digital life who Knows - maybe Wired is watching CCL for great ideas.

In the article Wired covers the best tools for all things digital: photos, ipods, MySpace, youTube and more. In our feature we show you how to make the best use of our resources to find the best information online.

Here's a couple of other fun online tools for the digerati:
LibraryElf: CCL sends out email notice of when books are ready for you to pick up and when they are overdue but those in the know use LibraryElf to get those messages at the times that suit them and to multiple email addresses
LibraryThing: catalogue your own books and add tags (more on tagging later). Find out who has the same books and other books that they have - a great way to grow your own collection. LibraryThing has also recently added a feature to create groups - an excellent feature for clubs where members are happy to swap books

Anti-tourism

Lost Cosmonaut by Daniel Kalder

"The anti-tourist does not visit places that are in any way desirable. The anti-tourist eschews comfort. The anti-tourist embraces hunger and hallucinations and shit hotels."

This book kicks "A year in provence" and all those romanticised travel books into touch as Kalder goes to places where the locals laugh when they hear is a tourist. Because no tourist ever comes to Tartarstan.

This book is so absorbing, it has 2 bookmarks in it because two of us are reading it at once ...

"Going Nowhere" - The Guardian reviews "Lost Cosmonaut"

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