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).

Winter Break Closure

 

Happy holidays! The Library will be closed from December 21st through January 2nd and will reopen on January 3rd. Have a safe and happy break. 

Friday Reads: The Woman in Me

 This week's Friday Reads is a bit predictable; Kelly tells us about her recent audiobook listen, The Woman in Me by Britney Spears. 

As a woman who was born in America in the 1980s, I am legally obligated to read Britney Spears' just-released memoir, The Woman in Me, and to give you my opinion about it. 

I grew up in the woods listening to country music, so I missed a lot of the Britney hype at its zenith, but I do have fond memories of bopping to "One More Time" in my Girl Scout leader's minivan. Even I, however, knew that Britney was a phenomenon; there was Britney Spears, and then there were all of the other female singers. Many of them would even make caustic references in their own songs and interviews about the impossibility of being held to her standard. 

Britney's memoir reveals that a lot of that image was smoke and mirrors, and that all of the pop-princess success came at an impossibly steep price. The book's juicy "reveals" that have made headlines are shocking and heartbreaking, but I was most saddened by the way she described her day-to-day life under her father's conservatorship. The monotony and degradation of that existence sounds unbearable, and I have so much respect for what she endured to maintain the "privilege" of time with her children. 

I don't have any formal psychology training, but it doesn't take any to recognize that she has been though a lot of trauma, beginning in her early childhood. While I believe that Britney is telling her truth, I'm not sure that all of it is the truth. And honestly, I'm not sure how much that matters. What is clear from public record is that, over and over again, the people closest to her viewed her as a meal ticket rather than as a person deserving of love and respect. I truly hope that she is getting the therapy, love, and support that she needs as she tries to pick up where she left off in her late teens and works on becoming her own woman.