Friday Reads: The Underworld

Happy Friday! This week Adam tells us about broadening his horizons by going deep beneath them in The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean by Susan Casey. 

A few years ago, I started a Dewey Decimal reading challenge, where my goal is to read one book from each of the 100 divisions of the Dewey Decimal Classification system. There are ten divisions for each of the ten main Dewey classes (Religion, Social Sciences, Language, Literature, Technology, etc.), so it covers a very broad range of topics, many of which I might never engage with if not for this challenge. I'm working through it gradually, reading about ten books for the challenge each year. For the Earth Sciences & Geology division (Dewey numbers 550-559), I've selected Susan Casey's highly accessible book about oceanography and submarine geology, The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean.

Casey does a magnificent job of illustrating why the deep ocean continues to become the subject of fascination, exploration, and research for a growing number of people, and how vitally important this part of our world is for our climate and planetary health. It's a vast, dark expanse filled with creatures more alien than much of what we've imagined exists on other planets, and much of it has been explored and studied for the first time only in the last three or four decades. Casey's great skill is to bring this alien world to vivid life in the reader's mind through evocative descriptive prose:

"He could see mounds of black pillow lava, and rust-colored mineral deposits that signaled the presence of iron, and strands of bacteria waving lazily in the current. Jumbles of rocks glistened with volcanic glass. It was a landscape of stark Plutonian beauty."

Extended Weekend Hours

 

Happy Extended Weekend! The Library will be CLOSED Saturday & Sunday and will be open 8:00 a.m. - 4:50 p.m. on Monday & Tuesday. 

Friday Reads: Don't Know Tough

F is for Fall and Football (and Friday Reads). This week, Library Director Adam Pellman discusses Don't Know Tough by Eli Cranor. 

While I no longer watch much football, it's that time of year, which made it an ideal time to read Don't Know Tough, a novel which is set against the backdrop of high school football in small-town Arkansas. The Denton Pirates have made the playoffs for the first time in many years, thanks mostly to the efforts of star running back Billy Lowe, whose explosive talents on the field are matched by his explosions of anger and violence off the field. Billy's troubled home life, where he suffers at the hands of his mom's abusive boyfriend, becomes the focus of the team's born-again Christian head coach, Trent Powers, who is intent on saving not just his team's winning season, but also Billy's soul. When the abusive boyfriend is found murdered, Billy becomes the prime suspect. This is a distinctly Southern noir, with a real feel for the insularity that can sometimes be found in small towns, but what ultimately makes the novel stand out is its examination of the ways that the bonds of family run deeper than anything else. I went into this novel expecting Friday Night Lights by way of Winter's Bone, but I think it's really the other way around.

Library Newsletter Fall 2024

 Our Fall newsletter is available now!

In this issue:

• Adam Pellman Appointed Library Director
• Librarian Search Update
• New EBSCOhost User Interface
• "Do People Still Study in the Library?"
• Niche Academy Tutorials Taking Off
• Study: Ability to Work Remotely has Positive Impact on Student Motivation

Click here to read the newsletter

Closed Wednesday for Juneteenth

 

The Library and the rest of the University are CLOSED tomorrow, June 19th, in honor of Juneteenth.

New look & feel for EBSCOhost

Users of EBSCOhost will notice a new look and feel to the databases this summer. We just migrated to the updated user interface, so take a few minutes to get acquainted with the new locations of your favorite features and tools. This brief video from EBSCO covers most of it:

Of note:

• The video is generic and not specific to Seton Hill; it mentions ebooks, but here at SHU, you'll still need to go to Ebook Central to find those.
• Items saved in folders should still be saved in the new "Projects" area, but sub-folders have disappeared. Articles that were saved before the interface migration are now in one big list and will need to be reorganized into separate "Projects."

Please let us know if you have any questions. We are still exploring and making some customizations, ourselves, so we value your feedback.

Summer Library Newsletter

 The Reeves Memorial Library Summer 2024 newsletter is live!

In this issue:

• Research Award Winners & Library Aide Honors Recipients Recognized 
• Librarian Search Update
• National Library Week Celebrations
• Library Staff Journeys with Elizabeth
• Archives Announcements

Finals Week Hours

It's finals week!

The Library (the staff office and the rooms with the books) will be open the following hours this week; the Learning Commons space is separate from the Library and its hours are not expected to change.

Tuesday, May 7: 8:00 a.m. - 9:50 p.m.

Wednesday & Thursday, May 8 & 9: 8:00 a.m. - 7:50 p.m.

Friday, May 10: 8:00 a.m. - 4:50 p.m.

CLOSED on Saturday & Sunday, May 11 & 12

Good luck to everyone on their exams and final projects, and a huge CONGRATULATIONS to the graduating students!

Friday Reads: Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

Happy Friday! This week, Interim Library Director Adam Pellman tells us about his current read, a nonfiction book about the era of World War I called Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins. 

It's always seemed to me that World War I has been overshadowed in American cultural memory by World War II. This is perhaps not surprising, given that our involvement in World War I was comparatively much shorter, and that, as time has gone by, veterans of World War II have been far more visible and celebrated in our culture as the "greatest generation." So I've been finding myself drawn more and more in recent years to books and films about World War I. This book distinguishes itself in that it's not a work of military history, but rather cultural history. It is a book about, as the author writes in the preface, "the emergence, in the first half of [the 20th] century, of our modern consciousness ... For our preoccupation with speed, newness, transience, and inwardness -- with life lived, as the jargon puts it, 'in the fast lane' -- to have taken hold, an entire scale of values and beliefs had to yield pride of place, and the Great War was ... the single most significant event in that development."

I'm only about halfway through the book, so the author is still focused on the events of the war itself, but he's already made some illuminating points. For example, he writes about the well-known Christmas truce that broke out along many parts of the western front in December of 1914, only a few months after the war began, when enemy soldiers openly fraternized, sharing food and drink and exchanging goods in a spirit of brotherhood and peace. Eksteins argues that such a widespread occurrence would have been unthinkable only a few years later, closer to the end of the war, as the shared values and "rules of war" (spoken or unspoken) had already changed so drastically. By 1917, this war, with its trenches and horrible new weapons, had become something new and different in the history of warfare. Eksteins attributes this change to Germany's initiative in altering the "methods, tactics, and instruments of war," and its position as the revolutionary power of Europe, with its willingness to "question western social, cultural, and political norms" even before the war began. "What was important above all for Germans," writes Eksteins, "was the overthrow of the old structures. That was the whole point of the war." He contrasts this with the British, whose more conservative aim in fighting the war was to restore and preserve their place as the dominant nation in western Europe, to retain the status quo. It's an interesting way to look at a country's military aims, not in relation to politics, or territory won or lost, but in relation to values. I'm looking forward to the rest of the book, to see how the author examines the war's influence on not just social and political developments, but also on literature and the arts.

Friday Reads, Special National Library Week Video Edition: Emily's Runaway Imagination

 Happy Friday, Happy National Library Week, and Happy D.E.A.R. (Drop Everything And Read) Day! This week's Friday Reads is a special video book talk about the origins of D.E.A.R. Day and of Kelly's favorite Beverly Cleary book, Emily's Runaway Imagination. 

National Library Week April 7-13 2024

National Library Week is an annual celebration sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA). It has been observed throughout the United States every April since 1958! The week highlights the many ways libraries, librarians, and library workers transform lives and strengthen school, public, academic, and special-interest communities.

The theme for that first National Library Week in 1958 was "Wake Up and Read!" This year, for the 66th celebration, the theme is “Ready, Set, Library!"

Throughout the week, stop by Reeves Hall and visit the Reeves Memorial Library spaces upstairs and downstairs for research help, interactive whiteboard questions, bookmark and sticker giveaways, and easy ways to express your support for the Library, its staff, and its resources. And make sure to participate on social media by following us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

National Library Week Events:

Monday-Friday, all day: Daily themed displays, bookmark giveaways, and a collaborative art project (by the Library desk on the main level of the Learning Commons)

Monday (Right to Read Day): ALA releases the State of America's Libraries report and the Top Ten Frequently Challenged Books of 2023, which we’ll share by our main desk and on our social media

Tuesday (National Library Workers Day): Library Aide appreciation day - thank a student Library worker

Wednesday (National Library Outreach Day): Stop by the display board for fun library trivia and to learn about the public libraries serving our region

Thursday (Take Action for Libraries Day): Post on our Padlet to let us know how the library advances your teaching, learning, and/or scholarship

Friday (Drop Everything And Read, or DEAR Day): In honor of Beverly Cleary, we’ll host a virtual book talk about one of her lesser-known books, and the first two people to find a library mouse will each win a USB book light

Spring break hours

 

The Library will be closed March 2-3, open 8:00 a.m. - 4:50 p.m. March 4-8, and closed March 9-10 for spring break. Normal term hours will resume on Monday, March 11th. Have a safe and happy spring break!

Friday Reads: Normal People

Happy Friday, Griffins and friends! Interim Director Adam Pellman is reading a once-buzzy and once-new novel, Normal People by Sally Rooney. Read on for his thoughts!

I'm in an online book club that's themed around movies and TV. We alternate each month between nonfiction books that are about movies and TV, and fiction books that have been adapted into movies and/or TV series. This month, the selection was Sally Rooney's Normal People, a novel that received a lot of buzz when it was published, and was made into a limited series a few years back. This is the perfect time for me to read it, as I have a tendency to read buzzy new novels years after they've stopped being buzzy or new.

The novel follows Marianne and Connell, both from the same small town in Ireland, who forge a strong, short-lived, and very secret relationship in high school, then meet again the following year in Dublin, where they both attend Trinity College. They drift in and out of each other's romantic lives, always drawn magnetically back to one another. I'm about halfway through the book right now, and their increasingly self-destructive behaviors give me the growing sense that deep troubles lie ahead.

Stylistically, this book is different from anything I've read in quite some time. For one thing, Rooney writes her dialogue without any quotation marks, like Cormac McCarthy or Bryan Washington. For another, her prose is very spare. I'm usually a sucker for lush, descriptive language, but this novel doesn't have that. I think it's one of the things that lends the novel such a powerful sense of intimacy. It's almost like the stripped down prose strips away the barrier between me and the characters. It's a 180-degree turn from the last novel I read, a big, sprawling sci-fi epic.

Friday Reads: Midnight Sun

 Happy Friday, Griffins! As Friday Reads fans know, Kelly's literary tastes are quite highbrow, and this week's selection is no exception. Read on for sparkly vampire drama as she tells us about Midnight Sun by Stephanie Meyer. 

I was a bit busy when Twilight came out in the fall of 2006; I had just started working here at Seton Hill! Since I was a few years older than the target audience, it took me a while to get around to picking up a copy. When I did, I liked it enough to drag my then-boyfriend/now-husband to watch the film in the theater alongside a lot of squealing teenage girls. (He spent the whole movie slouched in his seat with his hat pulled low, apparently in pain, and would occasionally mumble "Bite her neck!")

Midnight Sun is the same story, but as seen and experienced by Edward. It turns out that he is every bit the tortured drama queen we always thought he was. It's a feature, not a bug, folks. 

I read an electronic copy, but the print edition runs 832 pages, compared to Twilight's 544. I guess when you are immortal and are awake 24 out of every 24 hours, you don't feel the need to be concise to save time or space. Edward's account of every event runs longer than Bella's because he spends even more time in self-loathing than she does. 

Edward also intersperses a lot more backstory, which is fun; we learn more about the Cullen family and how its members all found each other and embarked on their "vegetarian" lifestyle. Now I want a Twilight retelling from Carlisle's perspective... or Emmett's. I bet Emmett's version would be pamphlet-length. 

J-Term Hours

 

Library hours for J-Term (January 3rd - January15th) will be Monday-Friday, 8:00 a.m. - 4:50 p.m., except for Thursday, January 11th (closed for the SHU employee winter workshop) and Monday, January 15th (closed for MLK Jr. Day).