Three Days Before the Shooting . . by Ralph Ellison - At his death in 1994, Ralph Ellison left behind roughly two thousand pages of his unfinished second novel, which he had spent nearly four decades writing. Long awaited, it was to have been the work Ellison intended to follow his masterpiece, Invisible Man...

The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris - In a radical departure from his satiric workplace comedy, Then We Came to the End (2007), Ferris turns in a dark and utterly compelling second novel on the insanity of modern life... [BookList Review]

Monsieur Pain by Roberto Bolaño - To drag fiction toward the unknown, [Bolaño] had to go there himself, and there invent a method with which to represent it. Since the unknown place was reality, the results are multi-dimensional. [The New York Review of Books]

Every year, hundreds of people and organizations put together lists of picks for the most notable happenings of the year. One man, Rex Sorgatz, has assembled a "meta-list," or list of lists, for the last 8 years. 2009 is no exception.

Aside from Rex's list, you may also be interested in Eat Me Daily's Best Cookbooks of 2009 Roundup. The "Best Horizon-Expander," Vefa's Kitchen, is available here at CPL.

Lastly, the history community lost a great cultural scholar, Ronald T. Takaki. Harry Allen has written a heartfelt obituary that mentions Dr. Takaki's book, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America.

• Author Shya Scanlon is serializing his new novel, Forecast, across 42 blogs in the coming weeks
• Concord Free Press gives away unique books, on the premise that the readers will donate to charity, then pass the book along
• Journalist and author Chris Anderson is giving away his latest book, Free, in multiple formats on the web. Of course, you can borrow it free here as well

• Google Books offers millions of books and editions, many in full text. Additionally, Google Books has LIFE Magazine for many years. Protip: Use the advanced search to "Full view only"
• Read Print Library has far fewer books (around 8,000), but the interface for finding and reading books is very friendly
• Internet Archive stores Project Gutenberg as well as many other texts. The archive also has video, audio, and web categories

• Of parrots and people : the sometimes funny, always fascinating, and often catastrophic collision of two intelligent species
• Parrot culture : our 2,500-year-long fascination with the world's most talkative bird
• Parrots : a natural history
• Parrots : everything about purchase, care, feeding, and housing : filled with full-color photographs
• Parrots of the world
• Amazon parrot puppet [Toy Ahoy!]

25 talented Canton teens attended our Teen Creative Writing class this Summer. The class, graciously taught by Linda Papa, met five Saturdays from June to August. The end result was some wonderful writing, which we continue to share with you with the piece, "Story of Image #1," by Helen Zhou.

...the ninth month of the Islamic calendar. It is the Islamic month of fasting, in which participating Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, sexual conduct, smoking, and indulging in anything that is in excess or ill-natured; from dawn until sunset. Fasting is meant to teach the Muslim patience, modesty and spirituality.

• Better than a thousand months : an American Muslim family celebration
• Ramadan
• Ramadan
• Ramadan : motivating believers to action : an interfaith perspective