Ocean City Free Public Library Book Blog

                       Fans of science fiction, video games and pop culture should add New York Times Bestseller “ Ready Player One ” by Ernest Cline to their list of must-reads.   USA Today has referred to it as "Willy Wonka meets The Matrix.” Although this may seem to be a strange comparison, nothing could be quite so accurate. On planet Earth in 2044, real life is pretty dismal. Most of society, including teenager Wade Watts, spends its waking hours plugged into the OASIS, an immense & fully interactive virtual world. OASIS users can be anyone and do anything that they choose. Think of the OASIS as a giant role-playing game…except the main character is you . Users can explore countless planets, purchase real estate, slay monsters and even attend school (as Wade does).   Wade's life changes when James Halliday, the enigmatic & reclusive creator of the OASIS, dies...leaving behind an enormous ...

A book released this year by Carol Hansen Montgomery titled Tapping The Fountain of Youth: Profiles of Women Runners Over 50 includes women from Cape May County, Ocean City, Hamilton, and Philadelphia. The book features photos, anecdotes, statistics and accomplishments of women runners from age 50 to 80 plus. Susan Reich of Ocean City, NJ is one of the women profiled in the book. Starting at age 22 and still running at age 52, she's a 30 year veteran who, according to the book, was the recent overall female winner of Ocean City's half marathon. She started training after joining the Brigantine Beach Patrol. Montgomery quotes Reich as saying, "As long as I'm having fun and staying healthy I'll keep running. I missed all aspects of this summer when I was injured. I'm addicted. I think part of the reason I keep improving is that I did not start running seriously until later in life. I had much room for improvement." Other locals profiled in the book...

I finished James Joyce's Ulysses last night, after months of reading (breaks for other books included). After putting it down, I opened my laptop and realized I'd just finished one of the most famous banned books of the 20th century during Banned Books week . It was a coincidence, but it still prompted me to do some research about the history of the book. Ulysses was published in 1922, but it wasn't until 1933 that U.S. courts lifted a ban on the book, according to an archived article from the December 7, 1933 edition of The New York Times . The article states that the book was banned by customs censors, "on the ground that it might cause American readers to harbor 'impure and lustful thoughts.'" By today's standards, although there are some memorably racy scenes in Ulysses , the book is relatively tame compared to contemporary pop culture —an average episode of Law and Order or Dexter includes more graphic violence and sexual content (in H...

For fans of author David Foster Wallace, his death in 2008 came as a surprise . Knowing that he isn't around to create characters like Hal, Mario and Avril Incandenza, Don Gately, and Joelle Van Dyne and knowing that he will never pen another novel makes The New Yorker writer D.T. Max's biography of Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, all the more valuable, as it may one of the last glimpses we have into Wallace's brilliant mind. In the book, Max provides exhaustively detailed accounts of Wallace's precocious childhood, his desire to please his grammar instructor mother, his struggles with mental health, alcohol and drugs, his successes in his time as a student in high school and at Amherst, and his struggles as a writer. The biography depicts Wallace as a man who was prodigious, which led to an early over confidence, but which as he aged and struggled through rehabilitation programs changed to what seemed a genuine humility. He began to change his view...

  It was announced yesterday that New Jersey's Junot Diaz has been awarded a MacArthur "Genius Grant." Diaz, who was born in the Dominican Republic but raised in New Jersey, is a Rutgers University graduate and a Pulitzer Prize winning author. In 2007, his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , won him the award. The MacArthur grant is a $500,000 award. I have read two of Diaz's books. The first, Drown , is a collection of short stories that was released in 1996. The second, Oscar Wao , was his first novel. His newest book, This is How You Lose Her, was released in September of this year and is another collection of short stories ( it has so far received much critical acclaim  as well as a place on The New York Times bestseller list ). In Drown one can engage with many of the same characters from his later works, including the narrator of Oscar Wao , Yunior, a character that recurs throughout Diaz's works. His style in Drown is similar t...