It's Summer and local Farmers' Markets have opened. Cook and enjoy what you buy.

The library now offers OneClickdigital for even more downloadable audiobooks.

The children's Carnegie Medal was established in 1936.  This June at the American Library Association's annual conference the first  winners of the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction will be announced.

The three finalists for Fiction are The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright, Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks, and Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. Find the nonfiction finalists here. The selection committee includes chair Nancy Pearl of Book Lust fame. How exciting to have Carnegie Medals for both adult and children's literature!

Club Book will host 10 free author events during the summer/fall 2012 season. Check out the Club Book website for details.

eBooks are available many foreign languages. Click on Advanced Search to limit your search by language.

Mexican novelist and essayist Carlos Fuentes died May 15 at the age of 83. In his obituary, The New York Times described him as "one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world." Fuentes wrote The Old Gringo in 1985, and his latest work Destiny and Desire was published in 2011. 

This award for best science fiction novel published in the U.S. will be presented the first weekend in July. Here are the nominees:

Ready Player One, Ernest Cline (Crown)
This Shared Dream, Kathleen Ann Goonan (Tor)
Soft Apocalypse, Will McIntosh (Night Shade)
Embassytown, China Miéville (Del Rey)
The Islanders, Christopher Priest (Gollancz)
The Highest Frontier, Joan Slonczewski (Tor)
Dancing with Bears, Michael Swanwick (Night Shade)
Robopocalypse, Daniel H. Wilson (Simon & Schuster)
Home Fires, Gene Wolfe (Tor)
Seed, Rob Ziegler (Night Shade)

Many comics fans have seen the film The Avengers. Did you know you could read Avengers comics at the library? You can also follow the solo adventures of the Incredible Hulk, the Black Widow, Hawkeye, Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, and more.

EBooks are a great way to enjoy a book without everyone else knowing what you're reading. Maybe that's why romance is currently the most popular genre for eBooks. 

Book Tours at the MIA! These are "lively discussions of works of art related to popular books." Drop in Tuesday mornings at 11:30 or Thursday evenings at 6:30 for a free docent tour. Some of the fiction titles coming up for tours are Dreams of Joy (June), Luncheon of the Boating Party (August), Cutting for Stone (October) and Madonnas of Leningrad (December). Past titles also can be explored when you arrange a private tour with the MIA. For more information, please read here.

I’ve just now finished this book and want to write this before the experience subsides.  One reviewer of As God Commands, the award-winning novel by Italian author Niccolo Ammaniti, said “If the Coen brothers ever wanted to go Italian, this’d be prime adaptation material.”  Indeed.  This is a brutal, sometimes darkly humorous novel of three men and one man’s son from the underside of society, bleeding anger and scheming on ways to make something of their lives.  Ammaniti, also the author of the brilliant suspense novel I’m Not Scared, describes characters, places and circumstances with a sense of foreboding and reality that cannot be denied.  I stopped halfway through, horrified by an event in the story, and decided to return it unread the following morning.  But at the library I picked it up just to read to the end of that page and wound up ignoring my responsibilities and reading the whole damned book in one long sitting.  For better or for worse, this is what a great book can do.

Romance continues to be the fastest growing segment of the eBook marketplace. Read the New York Times and Wall Street Journal articles.