Next Tuesday, September 18, the first of the themed Great American Read episodes will air. Titled “Who am I?” it focuses on books about self-identity and characters’ journeys. These themes are the classic catalysts of coming-of-age stories, which are admittedly one of my favorite genres. One of the ideas broached in the episode is that of reading a book at the right time.
This past weekend, Forbes published an op-ed that advocated for libraries being shut down and replaced by Amazon bookstores, all in the name of saving people tax money. Due to widespread public outrage, the piece has apparently been pulled, though it is still preserved on the Wayback Machine. I wrote this response while the article was still on Forbes’s website, and we are still posting it because we want to educate people about the role of public libraries and their very real value to their communities.
As someone who has spent the last 10 years working for the Berryville Public Library and is currently a member of our Friends of the Library board, I was horrified by the measures the Forbes editorial recommended. But I was also disturbed by the number of misconceptions that Panos Mourdoukoutas, the author of the piece, seems to have about what libraries actually do and the services they provide their communities.
He notes that in the past libraries provided resources like books, magazines, and journals, as well as quiet research places, comfortable places to enjoy books, space for community events, video rentals, and free internet access. However, according to his reasoning, these things can all be sought elsewhere, including Starbucks and Amazon bookstores.
I have been hearing these doom-and-gloom pronouncements about how outdated libraries are and how they are shortly on their way toward the fate of dinosaurs and dodos since I was first hired by a library. Inevitably, I have always found that they are perpetuated by people who have outdated ideas of what libraries do.
It’s that time of year again, where people are making resolutions and breaking resolutions. I tend to be more interested in and successful at book-related resolutions, which are more fun than regular resolutions, anyway.
For me, I have a few random literary resolutions this year. I always hesitate to pre-plan my reading too much because, quite frankly, I flit from one interest to another fairly quickly, so I know I am just setting myself up to fail if I have an overly rigid agenda of what I want to read for even a couple of months, let alone an entire year. But I have developed three that I think are achievable.
Now, here’s some food for thought. Literally!
Do you plan your cooking around your reading? Do you plan your reading around your eating? Or do they never correlate in your mind?
I must confess, it isn’t something I thought a lot about until I recently was catching up with Elise Bishop, one of my former college professors/bosses. She’s a regular blog reader, and when I told her I was always open to blog post idea suggestions, she told me I ought to write about the connection between literature and food. Thanks for the great suggestion, Mrs. B.!
What was your year in reading like?
I know a lot of my bookish friends tend to describe their year in reading by how many books they read — and I do that too — but that still doesn’t say much about your year in reading, like what you were actually reading in those 10, 25, 50, 75, 100, etc. books you read over the course of 2016.
And, so to that end, I thought I’d recap my year in reading –a lot of which did not end up on the blog — and you could share your year in reading in the comments.
Note: not all of the books I mention are available in the library, but we can certainly try to get them for you through ILL if you’re interested!
DO NOT READ THIS BOOK!
Worst thing I have ever read.
This book stinks!
Ever read any of these on an Amazon review? Ever intentionally sought out books with bad reviews? Now’s your chance since one of the challenges in the 2016 Library Challenge is to do just that – read a book with a bad review.
I must confess, this challenge probably amused me the most of any of the ones on this list when I first read it at the beginning of this year.
Because, really, how hard is it to find a book with bad reviews?
Continue reading “2016 Library Challenge: A Book with a Bad Review”
They say never judge a book by its cover, but let’s be honest: we all judge books by their cover, don’t we?
Continue reading “2016 Library Challenge:A Book Based Entirely on Its Cover”
Do you practice tsondoku?
You know, the practice of acquiring books and then leaving them unread, usually in piles, so they at least can keep each other company?
No?
Well, you might have a little harder time finding a book for this challenge. . . .
Continue reading “2016 Library Challenge: A Book You Own But Have Not Read”
As someone who has been an avid reader since childhood, I’ve always found one of the most nightmarish scenarios in literature the one that Ray Bradbury presents in Fahrenheit 451 where all books are banned.
To that end, September 25-October 1 is Banned Books Week, which makes it the perfect time to cross that requirement of reading a banned book off your library challenges list.
Can you read in more than one language? Not just basic sentences or even short paragraphs–could you sit down and read a book written entirely in another language?
If you’re anything like me, then your answer is going to be a resounding no. I took a couple of foreign languages in college and occasionally even can recognize words from those languages when they pop up on a movie or on the internet. But there’s no way I could read anything that wasn’t in English, which sadly limits my reading knowledge to publications originally written in the language or those someone has taken the time to translate.
Continue reading “2016 Library Challenge: A Book Translated From A Different Language”
Berryville Book Buzz 