Friday Reads: The Giver of Stars

 Librarianship hasn't always meant sitting in front of a screen and navigating databases. Today, Public Services Librarian Kelly Clever tells us about The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes, in which librarians deliver reading materials on horseback.

Kelly Clever with The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes

This book was recommended to me by a friend who knows that I grew up in the mountains and had horses. For some reason she said that the based-on-real-history novel about the "pack horse librarians" of Appalachia made her think of me...

Alice, a bored and frustrated young Englishwoman, falls fast and hard for a hunky traveling American from Kentucky. The two young people quickly marry and head back to the States for what Alice expects will be a glamorous socialite life in Lexington. 

As it turns out, however, Alice is headed for a small mining town and marriage proves to be anything but what she expected. Desperate to get out of the house, she volunteers to ride for the new pack horse library and help provide the isolated cabins in the mountains with reading material. It's hard and sometimes dangerous work, but Alice soon finds that the elements and the distrustful mountain folk are the least of her problems.

I like to think that I would have made a good pack horse librarian if I had lived in eastern Kentucky back in the 1930s. My dear departed pony, Buddy, would have been deeply annoyed by the mileage and the weight of the saddlebags, but I expect we would have done okay. 

Buddy and me, circa 2007

Friday Reads: The City of Mirrors

How are you enjoying your apocalypse? Cataloging & Acquisitions Librarian Adam Pellman found this particular Friday Reads, The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin, a little too on the nose for our current situation. 

The City of Mirrors is the final book in a trilogy about a vampire plague that has overrun North America (and probably the rest of the world, too). In the first book of the trilogy, an American scientist on an expedition in the jungles of Central America was bitten by a particularly nasty species of bat, leading to an infection that transformed him into a bloodthirsty vampire with superhuman strength. Government scientists then decided to use the vampire to start an experiment with human subjects that, unsurprisingly, went awry, resulting in the death or infection of almost everyone on the continent. This third book is set about a century later, as the descendants of those first survivors have gathered in isolated colonies in a fight against any remaining infected humans, which they call "virals."

I like the trilogy, but this turned out to be an unwise choice of novels to read during a pandemic. It's an inadvertently timely read. In one passage, an old newspaper article from the time of the initial outbreak sounds like it could be from 2020: "The Easter Virus ... can travel great distances attached to dust motes or respiratory droplets, causing many health officials to liken it to the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918, which killed as many as 50 million people worldwide. Travel bans have done little to slow its spread, as have attempts by officials in many cities to prevent people from congregating in public places." So much for escapism!

End of an Era

It's official: Reeves Memorial Library has deaccessed the remaining microfilm holdings from the collection. Whereas we at one time had many journals available on microfilm or fiche the last to disappear is our collection of The New York Times. Luckily a portion of the collection was sent to another academic library to complete their holdings. Godspeed to another remnant of libraries as we once knew them.