We really look forward to road trips for the opportunity they give us to listen to audiobooks. On our most recent trip, we visited the ocean floor and the outer reaches of the solar system, courtesy of  The Magic School Bus on the Ocean Floor and The Magic School Bus: Lost in the Solar System. In the second segment of a two-part series, Michele Braun shares resources to help you beat the high cost of audiobooks--and some book recommendations--while highlighting the organizations bringing terrific literature to life.

The holidays are coming. Will you and your family be traveling? Do you have an audiobook already lined up? Michele Braun weighs in with a two-part take on the "Does listening to an audio book count as ‘reading’?” controversy and reveals some of her methods for locating inexpensive audiobook versions of her family's favorite reads.

It’s that time of year again. Back to school? No! It’s time for the tugboat races!

This year New York City’s tugboat races will be held on October 9 (traditionally, they are held before Labor Day). If you are a member of a tugboating family or connected with the port, you may get an invite to be on board a tug for the races. Not connected? No worries. You can watch from on land (the race runs from Pier I at West 70th Street to Pier 84 at West 44th Street/Hudson River Park) or from another boat. The Working Harbor Committee commissions a spectator boat for the race. Last year, my family joined the race on the historic fireboat John J. Harvey. Although the Harvey didn’t win the race, the nose-to-nose pushing or line-toss contests, we all agreed afterwards that it had been a terrific day out. 

Junior was so intrigued when I brought home the NYPL summer reading flyer below last summer that he insisted on sleeping with it. Since we read tons of books anyway, I thought, why not get credit for what we do? Thus began my mini-experiment of signing up for all of the free summer reading programs in our area. Read on to find out our results! 

Guest poster Michele Braun says, “It all started with The Hound of the Baskervilles.”

People often ask how I learned to “speed read.” I usually laugh it off and tell them that I had to learn how to read quickly because I was always getting tossed out of stores for reading comic books without buying them! If I wanted to find out what was going on with the Justice League, I had to do it quickly, before a store employee realized I’d spent 40 minutes in the magazine section thumbing all the comics. After spending a year with a beginning reader, I realize that there may be something to my theory. Have you noticed that comic book writers use a lot of sight words? Also, the word bubble/narration box structure of comic book pages lends itself handily to cluster reading.

 If I paid list price for all the children’s books we buy, we’d be eating ketchup packets for dinner. Read on for my techniques for obtaining childrens’ books on the cheap. What are your strategies?

This post goes out to our friend Jen. She’s one of those people who’s always into something interesting. Her car’s back footwells are awash with intriguing kids’ books and toys, and she’s always got something cool on the stereo. Since she’s a children’s librarian, she knows about new children’s media before anyone else.