The Composer is Dead

Don’t waste your time reading this book….because the CD that comes with it of Lemony Snicket reading it accompanied by the San Francisco Symphony is BRILLIANT!!  When I looked at this picture book in the warehouse the other day, it didn’t grab me like I was hoping a new Lemony Snicket book would.  But when it came across my desk today and I noticed that there was an audio version narrated by Mr Snicket himself, well I had to take a listen.

The composer is dead and the Lemony Snicket-esque Inspector interviews the instruments of the orchestra to get to the bottom of the murder.  It’s  a who’s who of the instruments of the orchestra with musical accompaniment.  This is a great intro to these instruments and the parts  they play in the the orchestra.  The murder mystery is quite cleverly solved at the end.

Illustrations by Carson Ellis and music composed by Nathaniel Stookey

YA Audiobooks

Wednesday we had a really great meeting about our young adult audiobooks collection and its usage at our first Collection Confabulation.  I provided stats that compared collection size and circ at each branch and then we brainstormed ways to market the collection.  Long story short, our YA books on CD and Playaway are about as popular as our Juvenile audiobooks, only the collection is much much smaller.  I’m encouraging locations to try and give YA audio a little more shelf space if they’re feeling overwhelmed by the number of CDs and APs and asking you to consider weeding all of your YA cassettes and VHS tapes if you need more room.  The stats showed that except for VA, no one had more than 4 YA books on cassette checked out on the day we surveyed, and most had less than that or none.  Let me know if you’d like me to email you a copy of the stats we looked at!

Coming soon…

I just looked through The Big Bell and the Little Bell which will be coming soon to a library near you. It’s a picture book of the 1954 Martin Kalmanoff song about a king, a big bell and a little bell. The moral of the story: “Yes, a great big bell makes a mighty sound, and a little bell just makes a tiny clink. But as you can see…Those who make the biggest noise aren’t always as important as they think.” What attracted me to the book was the music CD that accompanies is. It includes the original Julius LaRosa recording as well as a new recording. It’s a cute story and a catchy old song. Could be fun to read the story in storytime then play the song(s) accompanied by the attendees ringing bells!

*Because this is not a reading of the full text of the book, it will be cataloged as an E, not an ECD.