Here is another selection of titles that have a limited preview available at Google Books (see my earlier post). BTW, all of these are available in the CA Library collection (of course!)

Hush: An Irish Princess’  Tale by Donna Jo Napoli — Fifteen-year-old Melkorka, an Irish princess, is kidnapped by Russian slave traders and not only learns how to survive but to challenge some of the brutality of her captors, who are fascinated by her apparent muteness and the possibility that she is enchanted.

How To Build A House by Dana Reinhardt — Seventeen-year-old Harper Evans hopes to escape the effects of her father’s divorce on her family and friendships by volunteering her summer to build a house in a small Tennessee town devastated by a tornado.

Trouble by Gary D. Schmidt — Fourteen-year-old Henry, wishing to honor his brother Franklin’s dying wish, sets out to hike Maine’s Mount Katahdin with his best friend and dog. But fate adds another companion–the Cambodian refugee accused of fatally injuring Franklin–and reveals troubles that predate the accident.

Black Box by Julie Schumacher — When her sixteen-year-old sister is hospitalized for depression and her parents want to keep it a secret, fourteen-year-old Elena tries to cope with her own anxiety and feelings of guilt that she is determined to conceal from outsiders.

Antsy Does Time by Neal Shusterman — Fourteen-year-old Anthony “Antsy” Bonano learns about life, death, and a lot more when he tries to help a friend with a terminal illness feel hopeful about the future.

Ghost Medicine by Andrew Smith — Still mourning the recent death of his mother, seventeen-year-old Troy Stotts relates the events of the previous year when he and his two closest friends try to retaliate against the sheriff’s son, who has been bullying them for years.

Climbing The Stairs by Padma Venkatraman — In India, in 1941, when her father becomes brain-damaged in a non-violent protest march, fifteen-year-old Vidya and her family are forced to move in with her father’s extended family and become accustomed to a totally different way of life.

After Tupac and D Foster by Jacqueline Woodson — In the New York City borough of Queens in 1996, three girls bond over their shared love of Tupac Shakur’s music, as together they try to make sense of the unpredictable world in which they live.

What The World Eats by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio — A photographic collection exploring what the world eats featuring portraits of twenty-five families from twenty-one countries surrounded by a week’s worth of food.

FreeRice is a quiz game site that enables you to make a difference by contributing to hunger relief efforts in third world countries… simply by answering questions! Answer multiple questions in English, Geography, Chemistry, Foreign Languages, Art and Math — for every question you get right, 10 grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Program.

Although 10 grains of rice may not seem like a lot, users of the site helped contribute over 61 MILLION grains IN ONE DAY yesterday, and over 68 BILLION grains to date. That’s a lot of food, just by answering some questions. You can answer as many questions as you’d like, as often as you’d like.

The rice is paid for by the sponsors displayed at the bottom of the screen when you answer questions correctly, so consider supporting them as well.

Visit FreeRice today and help contribute to hunger relief efforts worldwide. And tell your friends!

As Google, authors, publishers and copyright lawyers work through the legal intricacies of Google’s plan to digitize the world’s libraries, we can take advantage of the work done so far to bring literature to the masses. Of course, the Google Books project operates under copyright restrictions, so new books are not available in their entirety. Some books aren’t available at all.

Some publishers, however, allow a limited preview of their titles, which enables readers to take a look at a book before making a decision to buy it or borrow it from local library. Here is a sample of some of the books that have a limited preview available:

Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson — After being sold to a cruel couple in New York City, a slave named Isabel spies for the rebels during the Revolutionary War.

Audrey, Wait!‎ by Robin Benway — While trying to score a date with her cute co-worker at the Scooper Dooper, sixteen-year-old Audrey gains unwanted fame and celebrity status when her ex-boyfriend, a rock musician, records a breakup song about her that soars to the top of the Billboard charts.

Shift‎ by Jennifer Bradbury — When best friends Chris and Win go on a cross country bicycle trek the summer after graduating and only one returns, the FBI wants to know what happened.

The Fortunes of Indigo Skye‎ by Deb Caletti — Eighteen-year-old Indigo is looking forward to becoming a full-time waitress after high school graduation, but her life is turned upside down by a large check given to her by a customer who appreciates that she cares enough to scold him about smoking.

Graceling‎ by Kristin Cashore — In a world where some people are born with extreme and often-feared skills called Graces, Katsa struggles for redemption from her own horrifying Grace, the Grace of killing, and teams up with another young fighter to save their land from a corrupt king.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins — Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen accidentally becomes a contender in the annual Hunger Games, a grave competition hosted by the Capitol where young boys and girls are pitted against one another in a televised fight to the death.

Mexican Whiteboy‎ by Matt De La Pena — Sixteen-year-old Danny searches for his identity amidst the confusion of being half-Mexican and half-white while spending a summer with his cousin and new friends on the baseball fields and back alleys of San Diego County, California.

Little Brother‎ by Cory Doctorow — After being interrogated for days by the Department of Homeland Security in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco, California, seventeen-year-old Marcus, released into what is now a police state, decides to use his expertise in computer hacking to set things right.

Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd — In 1981, the height of Ireland’s “Troubles,” eighteen-year-old Fergus is distracted from his upcoming A-level exams by his imprisoned brother’s hunger strike, the stress of being a courier for Sinn Fein, and dreams of a murdered girl whose body he discovered in a bog.

The Red Necklace: a Story of the French Revolution‎ by Sally Gardner — In the late eighteenth-century, Sido, the twelve-year-old daughter of a self-indulgent marquis, and Yann, a fourteen-year-old Gypsy orphan raised to perform in a magic show, face a common enemy at the start of the French Revolution.

Looks‎ by Madeleine George — Two high school girls, one an anorexic poet and the other an obese loner, form an unlikely friendship.

The Last Exit to Normal‎ by Michael Harmon — Yanked out of his city life and plunked down into a small Montana town with his father and his father’s boyfriend, seventeen-year-old Ben, angry and resentful about the changed circumstances of his life, begins to notice that something is not quite right with the little boy next door and determines to do something about it.

Playing with Matches‎ by Brian Katcher — While trying to find a girl who will date him, Missouri high school junior Leon Sanders befriends a lonely, disfigured female classmate.

Pretty Monsters: Stories‎ by Kelly Link — A collection of short stories includes “The Wrong Grave,” in which a boy digs up his girlfriend’s corpse in order to retrieve the poems that he buried with her, and “Monster,” in which a monster uses a cell phone to lure its prey.

Bonechiller‎ by Graham McNamee — Four high school students face off against a soul-stealing beast that has been making young people disappear their small Ontario, Canada, town for centuries.

Madapple by Christina Meldrum — A girl who has been brought up in near isolation is thrown into a twisted web of family secrets and religious fundamentalism when her mother dies and she goes to live with relatives she never knew she had.

I’ve been having a lot of fun making word clouds using the free Wordle application. A word cloud is a visual representation of a piece of text, with words that appear more frequently showing up bigger and more prominently. Here is an example, using “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe…

Image created by the Wordle.net web application

The possibilities are endless! Change the font, color, arrangement, the frequency of words, whatever! Be creative!

Rodd Lucier has developed a list of his Top 20 Uses for Wordle at his blog The Clever Sheep.

The best part about Wordle, besides being free, is that the images created by the Wordle application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license, which means that you can use them for anything you’d like, as long as you give the developer credit. Cool!