iHCPL The Web According to Google #85: Resistance is Futile

1. What Google products do you use on a regular basis? Why do you use them and what makes them better than a competing product?

Google [the search engine]
If there’s an answer or a bit of information on the web, Google finds it. Over the past few years I have also tried Agent 55 and Mamma Metasearch, which will generally turn up what I need because they include Google in their searches. Wolfram|Alpha has never returned a relevant answer for me. Quintura has an interesting way of displaying results. Bing is just a Google wannabe.

Gmail My personal e-mail, cheap, and it presorts all the commercial e-mails and political e-mails into folders so I can quickly scan and dispose of them.

Blogger My blog for iHCPL. I have not tried any other ones.

Reader I use this aggregator for my RSS feeds., alas so much to read so little time! 789 posts! How could that many aggregate is less than a week? I use it because I can’t find the time to try anything else.




2. Check out Google Labs. Did you see any new products that you want to try?

No, I can’t think of any use that I could make of any of these.

3. Search or browse Google Books. Do they have the book or magazine you looked for?

Yes there was a copy of Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. I am listening to an audio version of this book now, and I wondered how some of the proper nouns were spelled. So I was able to discover how Doc Daneeka’s name and the imaginary island of Pianosa were spelled.

Did you find any gems? How can this be used in the library?

The ability to search the full text of a book is an excellent and fast way to find a specific fact in a book, especially if I’m trying to find a particular passage in a fiction book. Since the vast majority of them have no index, Google Books is the concordance to them. Amazon can also be used this way, although its coverage is limited to select in print works.

Goth Girl Rising

Goth Girl rising / Barry Lyga. -- New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.
390 p. ; 22 cm.
Sequel to: The astonishing adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl
ISBN: 9780547076645

1. Emotional problems of teenagers -- Fiction. 2. Goth culture (Subculture) – Fiction. 3. Grief – Fiction. 4. High schools – Fiction. 5. Interpersonal relations – Fiction. 6. Mothers -- Death – Fiction. 7. Psychotherapy – Fiction. 8. Schools – Fiction. 9. Teenage girls – Fiction.

813.6

Kyra Sellers, Goth Girl of The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl is back from her stay at the Maryland Mental Health Unit, sent there, she discovers, because of her condition: a severe case of DCHH, Daddy Couldn't Handle Her. Her mom went to the hospital and died, but Kyra figures she’s tougher than her mom.

So watch out people at South Brook High. Kyra swings between sad and angry. Sad is hopeless, powerless and confusing, but anger, anger gives you the power to do something and a target to hit. She knows her father Roger and the teachers are after her. She’s not sure about her friends Jecca (formerly known as Jessica) and Simone. And then there’s Fanboy; she could talk to Fanboy and things felt better. But Fanboy betrayed her. He called her father and told Roger that she had a bullet. And then for the six months she was locked in DCHH he never called her, never sent an e-mail—just like Jecca didn’t. Well,

“Eff all them.

And eff him too.

Who said he could be happy? Who said he could just forget about me?”

Kyra’s side of the story is an excellent portrayal of the anger that boils up from the hopelessness of grief, and the hope born of love and honesty to bind the wounds of life and death.

The Shakespeare Stealer

The Shakespeare stealer / Gary Blackwood. -- New York : Dutton Children's Books, c1998.
216 p. ; 22 cm.
ISBN: 0525458638


1. Great Britain -- History -- Elizabeth, 1558-1603 – Fiction. 2. Orphans – Fiction. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 – Fiction. 4. Theater – Fiction.

813.54

Widge is delighted when Dr. Bright takes him away from the orphanage in Yorkshire at age seven to be his apprentice. Vain, melancholy and unaffectionate Dr. Bright educates Widge to read and write in English, Latin, and a kind of shorthand of Dr. Bright’s invention called “charactery,” and then sells his apprenticeship to a brooding, gruff, mysterious, silent, and deadly stranger when Widge is fourteen. Eventually Widge comes to know him as Falconer.

Without hesitation Falconer marches Widge off south. They travel day and night, Falconer warning Widge to keep quiet, and also cutting the throats of a few cutpurses along the way who attempt to waylay them. Eventually they arrive in Leicester, and Widge meets his new master, Simon Bass. Mr. Bass explains his new duties to him. He’s to travel to London.

“…When you go to London, you will attend a performance of a play called The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. You will copy it in Dr. Bright’s ‘charactery’ and you will deliver it to me.”

“… I am a man of business, Widge, and one of my more profitable ventures is a company of players. They are not so successful as the Lord Chamberlain’s of the Admiral’s Men, by they do a respectable business here in the Midlands. As they have no competent poet of their own they make do with hand-me-downs, so well used as to be threadbare. If they could sage a current work, by a poet of some reputation, they could double their box.”

So, accompanied by Falconer, Widge sets off to London to capture a copy of the play. He puts the penny Falconer supplies him with, in the admission box at the Globe, and joins the crowd of groundlings in front of the stage. His transcription goes well, until he gets caught up in the play, and forgets to write down some parts. The next day, to save a penny—they were worth a lot more then—he sneaks in backstage to listen to the lines. Unfortunately he’s discovered . So he makes up a lie. He tells the theater company that he desperately wants to be a player and has run away from his master in the hope of joining them. To his surprise, they take him in. Now he must act the part of a player until he gets an opportunity to complete his copy of the script, or steal the copy owned by the company.

Well developed characters, a believable sense of place, and an interesting plot filled with surprises and disguises pack this exceptionally good tale of Elizabethan theater full of verisimilitude and delight.

King of Shadows

King of shadows / Susan Cooper.-- New York : Margaret K. McElderry Books, 1999.
186 p. ; 22 cm.
ISBN: 0689828179

1. Time travel -- fiction. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Fiction. 3. Actors and actresses -- Fiction. 4. Globe Theater (Southwark, London, England) – Fiction.

813.54

Nat Field is one of the two dozen in the American Company of Boys, all of them actors under the age of eighteen and all of them hand picked by producer and director Arby to travel to London to put on two of Shakespeare’s plays at the newly reconstructed Globe theater in 1999. Nat is excited when they arrive in England. He just wishes Arby wasn’t so driven and didn’t drive his actors so hard. But the night before he’s set to debut as Puck in "A Midsummer's Night Dream" disaster strikes. He gets sick, really, really sick. He goes to sleep and wakes up in the morning about four centuries earlier. He’s still in London, and a strange new fellow named Harry greets him by name, and says he’s glad he’s better, he was afraid that he’d had the plague. Nat still has his part in the play. Harry’s glad he didn’t forget his lines. But the production is not at the new Globe, it’s at the original, and Nat finds himself working for the play's author.

Alchemy and Meggy Swann

Alchemy and Meggy Swann / Karen Cushman.—Boston : Clarion Books, 2010.

176 p. : ill., map ; 22 cm.
ISBN: 9780547231846

1. Alchemy -- Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters -- Fiction. 3. Great Britain -- History -- Elizabeth, 1558-1603 -- Fiction. 4. London (England) -- History -- 16th century -- Fiction. 5. People with disabilities -- Fiction.

813.54

When her beloved granny died, Margaret Swann is informed by her mother that her father has sent for her, and she’s to go live with him in London. Meggy is shocked; she never knew that she had a father. Well, she knew that she must have had a father because everyone has or had one, but never in her thirteen years has her mother mentioned him to her. So she arrives in London with her only friend: her pet goose Louise. Louise has a sprung wing and cannot fly, just as Meggy has crooked legs and cannot walk. Using two walking sticks she can lurch forward from side to side painfully dragging her legs along with her, but she doesn’t call it walking; she calls it “wabbling.”

London, when she arrives in 1573, does not impress her. It’s crowded, it’s noisy, it’s filthy, it stinks, and they have dead men’s heads hung on their bridges! “Ye toads and vipers!” she exclaims upon arrival at her father’s house at the Sign of the Sun on Crooked Lane. Insult is added to injury when her father, Master Ambrose the Alchemist expresses his disappointment that she is not a son, wonders aloud if she is a crackbrain, and then walks away from her upstairs into his attic room. The only civil person she meets that day is Roger Oldham, Master Ambrose’s assistant, a boy of about her own age, who is delighted to have just found a new job as a player with a troop of actors. Eventually Roger and Meggy will become friends and verbal sparring partners, but now with Roger leaving and her father—Master Peevish—as she thinks of him, obsessed with finding the secret of immortality, Meggy must find a way to care for herself in this challenging new world.