One final reminder… the Spelling Bee is happening at AS220 tonight!  Compete for fabulous prizes (including a membership to the Providence Athenaeum) or watch as thirty-six spellers try their best to win the Spelling Bee crown.

The action starts at 9pm, and spellers are encouraged to show up a little early, since we had to turn some latecomers away last year…

I’m a little behind getting these made, but hopefully you’ll start seeing these appearing around town in the next couple of days…

Not About The Buildings’ Third Annual Spelling Bee is coming!

Competition will be fierce as some of the city’s biggest spartypantses compete for the Spelling Bee crown. There will be fame, honor and glory for the winner, and sorrow, infamy and more sorrow for everyone else. Benefits Not About The Buildings, an organization committed to supporting readers and writers.

$5 to compete, free to watch
AS220
115 Empire St, Providence
9 pm; be PROMPT if you want to spell.

About 120 layoff notices went out to Providence Public Library staff this week. Not a surprise and not that many people will be laid off, but it’s still a scary prospect for the library staff downtown who don’t know whether they’ll be laid off for real or not.  Here’s the Providence Business News story about it.

There’s been a crazy whirlwind of news surrounding the Providence Public Library lately, and I’m sorry I haven’t been reporting on it as attentively as I should have.

Library trustees voted on Thursday to start transitioning the nine neighborhood branches to the City.  At the same time, they suggested closing the Central library to the public, because, according to library spokesman Tonia Mason, the PPL would not be able to adequately staff the Central Library if the city gave all its money to the branches.  The logic here is completely insane; in addition to the fact that the Central Library is the go-to branch for anyone who lives or works downtown, the idea that a hundred-and-twenty year-old non-profit library with a thirty-plus million dollar endowment could not raise the money to keep one building open to the public is ridiculous.  Especially since they’ve already cut back staff once in 2004 (in a move that led to the formation of the Library Reform Group and the unionization of employees.)

The Library plans to issue pink slip to nearly all staff this week; the branch librarians will presumably become city employees after June 30, and according to the PPL’s plan only twenty-one employees will be retained downtown.  Since it hasn’t yet been determined which twenty-one people would be retained, the PPL is obligated by the union to issue 60-day notices to everyone, regardless of whether they’re eventually laid off or not.

You can read about this all in Library Journal, the ProJo and in Providence Business News.  You can see an interview with Tonia Mason on Channel 10 here.

[Thanks to Patricia Raub for all the articles; if you're interested, the Library Reform Group periodically sends out newsletters that are a little more timely than I am.]

Two notable events this week:

Celebrity chef Lidia Bastianich, of Lidia’s Italy fame, is going to be at Farmstead in Wayland Square signing books from 3-6.

Tomorrow, Kevin Roose, Noam Dorr, Sandra Allen, Rachel Arndt, and Emily Silverman will be reading at 4 pm at the Brown Bookstore.  They’re the undergraduate recipients of Brown’s Nonfiction Writing Program Awards.

Because I never cease to be entertained by people re-imagining things as book covers, here’s Flickr user Little Pixel, who re-imagined some of his favorite LPs as classic Pelican editions.  The Sleeper album above is, incidentally, one of the only Britpop albums I still listen to with any regularity.  (And Sleeper singer Louise Wener also wrote a novel, which is actually pretty good.)

[via Largehearted Boy]

This happened a full month ago now, and I can’t believe I’m only just getting to the recap…  But the Dead-In was fabulous!  Fifteen readers celebrated the end of winter (and St. Patrick’s Day) by reading Joyce aloud to a packed crowd at Ada Books.  The fifty-four page story took almost two hours to read, with nearly everyone on the edge of their closely-spaced seats the whole time.  Readers included Ada owner Brent Legault, last year’s Spelling Bee champion Maureen Reddy, and a number of readers from last year’s Frome-In.

There was also a really nice profile of Not About The Buildings in the Brown Daily Herald to coincide with the event.

More pictures after the jump:

[Read more →]

I decided–as many people do every year–to commit to reading a book a week for 2009.  Fifteen weeks in to 2009 I’ve only read eight, which is barely half.  That’s a pretty terrible number, considering how much free time I have these days.  And I should probably mention that all eight of them were pretty short.

I had planned on including book reviews when I started this blog, but if you’re wondering why I never post any it’s because I seem to barely read anymore, and I don’t want to risk reading even less by forcing myself to write reviews afterwards.  Plus half of those eight books were old crime novels, which you’re probably not interested in, anyway.

(However, if YOU would like to review books for this blog, let me know.)

I use GoodReads to keep track of my reading, because otherwise I’d never remember what I read.  You can find me here, if you’re interested.

The winner of the Margaret Stilwell Prize, given each year to one of Providence’s young book collectors, is being announced right now at the Athenaeum.  I’m reeeeeeeally sorry I’m so far behind with the posting. (There’s also an organizational meeting for a new Friends of Washington Park Library that started fifteen minutes ago.  Which, again, sorry.)

There’s been a lot of action going on with the library; it seems as though the PPL may be ready to cede the city’s nine branches to the non-profit Providence Community Library, though the city’s not saying for sure yet which one it’s going to give the money to.  There have been lots of press releases floating around, but still no decision from the city.

In branch news, the brand-new Friends of the South Providence Library have a new blog, with a list of stuff they’d like donated.

And in other local book news:

The New Plays Festival started at Brown last night and runs through Sunday.

There’s a Publicly Complex reading at Ada this Saturday: Deborah Poe, Jon Woodward and Dobby Gibson.

There Will Still Be Light: A Freedom To Write Literary Festival hits Brown next week, with the literature of Burma being celebrated.  There’s a Burmese film festival happening (although it’s at four in the afternoon, for some reason.)  Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, and Amitow Ghosh will all be reading during the week, too.  The whole schedule’s here.

And a week from Saturday there’s a book/bake sale to benefit the Friends of the Smith Hill Library.