Celebrating our Seniors!

 

We want to congratulate Emily & Chelsi, Library Aides graduating in December 2021!

Emily Coglio & Chelsianna Havko both began working here at the Library in Spring 2019. They have since each worked over 500 hours at the Library! We will miss them but are so excited to see what they do next. 

Emily Coglio will be graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Business. She plans to pursue a career within the costuming sector of the theatre industry. Her favorite memory of working at the library happened her freshman year when she was working during finals week. She was in the silent reading room and there was only one patron there and he had built a fortress-like structure out of books around himself—she found this quite humorous. She will definitely miss the library once she graduates.

Chelsi Havko is an English and Environmental Studies double major.  She hopes to find a job in publishing or editorial writing, and would love to work for an environmental non-profit someday. She is constantly debating if she should go to graduate school. She has worked as a library aide for three years. Her favorite memory was being disturbed by a library book containing unorthodox Thanksgiving recipes from the 90s. She will miss seeing the therapy dogs in their Halloween costumes and talking to the librarians about her many research projects. 

Thanksgiving Break

The Library will be closing tomorrow evening (Wednesday) at 4:50 p.m. and will reopen on Monday morning at 8:00. Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Holiday Reading Theme: Holidays

Yeah, we really stretched for this theme! 

Do you prefer your holiday fiction hot and heavy or gory and grim? We have Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s tales to suit every fancy. Grab a mug of something warm and curl up with a good book.

Photo by Valentin Antonini on Unsplash

A Highlander for Christmas by Sandy Blair

Boston antiques dealer Claire MacGregor is not looking forward to another solo Christmas. However, when she is fooling around with an old puzzle box, it opens and a gorgeous Scottish nobleman from the 18th century magically appears. (Publisher’s summary)

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie

Poirot is called to the family estate of Simeon Lee, after he is found lying in a pool of blood on Christmas Eve. (Publisher’s summary)

Less than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark. (Publisher’s summary)

The Poseidon Adventure by Paul Gallico

The luxury liner "Poseidon" is hit by a massive tsunami on New Year's Eve, rocking the ship upside down, and a small band of trapped survivors must work their way through the labyrinth of the ship's underbelly to escape. (Publisher’s summary)

Jerusalem Inn by Martha Grimes

Superintendent Richard Tury of Scotland Yard spends his Christmas holiday at a colorful country inn near a vast estate inhabited by the titled, the rich, the famous, and--suddenly--the deceased. (Publisher’s summary)

Skipping Christmas by John Grisham

In this hilarious look at the chaos and frenzy that have become part of our holiday tradition, a weary couple is about to discover skipping Christmas brings enormous consequences and isn't half as easy as they had imagined. (Publisher’s summary)

A Different Kind of Christmas by Alex Haley

Haley has written a sentimental tale of and for Christmas. Set in 1855, the story features a student at Princeton whose father is a U.S. senator and one of the biggest slaveholders in North Carolina. Changing dormitories to escape the persecution of some nasty northern students, Fletcher Randall finds himself under a different style of peer pressure. After meeting three Quaker brothers who introduce him to the antislavery activism of their friends and family in Pennsylvania, Randall becomes involved in the Underground Railroad and in an escape attempt on Christmas Eve, 1855. (Booklist review)

Christmas Holiday by W. Somerset Maugham

Charley Mason's trip to Paris is haunted by his meeting with Lydia, a wayward girl whose family was displaced by the Russian Revolution and who "pines for a man half a world away, a dope dealer and murderer whose sins Lydia seeks to absolve through her own self-destruction." (Publisher’s summary)

Turkey Day Murder by Leslie Meier

Amateur sleuth Lucy Stone investigates when Tinker's Cove's annual Thanksgiving festivities are interrupted by the murder of Metinnicut Indian activist Curt Nolan and uncovers a host of suspects while cooking up a holiday dinner for twelve. (Publisher’s summary)

The Dons and Mr. Dickens: The Strange Case of the Oxford Christmas Plot: A Secret Victorian Journal, attributed to Wilkie Collins, discovered and edited by William J. Palmer

On a dank and dreary November evening, Inspector William Field summons Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens to a crime scene in London's notorious Chinese opium district. When the two arrive in the seedy neighborhood, they learn that a man has been murdered and the victim is none other than an Oxford Don.

The Raven in the Foregate: The Twelfth Chronicle of Brother Cadfael by Ellis Peters

Christmas, 1141. After refusing to baptize the illegitimate baby of a local prostitute, the new parish priest is found dead in the river. Brother Cadfael investigates. (Publisher’s summary)

Philly Stakes by Gillian Roberts

Amanda Pepper, an English teacher at school for Philadelphia's filthy rich, is determined to teach the kids a lesson about the true spirit of Christmas. She intends to have them cook and serve a meal to the homeless, but unfortunately a powerful parent takes over, and the simple meal turns into a catered affair--topped off by murder. Of course, Amanda wants to solve the crime with her sometime boyfriend and cop C.K. Mackenzie. She's equally determeind to teach the the elusive killer a lesson or two, as well. (Publisher’s summary)

Friday Reads: Station Eleven

Have you had enough of pandemics yet? Sometimes the best way to process a real-life challenge is through fiction. In that spirit, Adam is reading Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

Station Eleven is at least the the third novel I've read during the COVID-19 pandemic that is about survival after a viral plague has wiped out most of humanity. Apparently, escapism is not really my thing.

After the heart-racing opening chapters set right at the start of a devastating flu outbreak in Toronto, the novel jumps back and forth between the years before the pandemic and a time twenty years later. The post-pandemic sections follow Kirsten Raymonde and her fellow actors and musicians as they travel between settlements as part of a small theatre troupe, the Traveling Symphony. The chapters set in the pre-pandemic years focus on various other characters, including an entertainment journalist-turned-paramedic, a famous actor, and the actor's artist ex-wife. With over 100 pages still to go, I already get the sense that these characters' lives are closely connected in a sort of Dickensian, fate-filled way that can be hard for some novelists to pull off without it seeming too convenient, but that Mandel seems clearly talented enough to pull off easily.

November DVD Spotlight: Musicals and Music Films

This month, we're shining our spotlight on movies that celebrate song and dance in a variety of different ways.  We've included traditional musicals like West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965) alongside more recent genre staples like Rent (2005), but we've also featured movies that, while they are not musicals, focus on music as part of their central story.  There's Christopher Guest's hilarious folk music-centric mockumentary A Mighty Wind (2003), and Jean Renoir's lush Technicolor masterpiece French Cancan (1955).

Other featured titles include:

Copying Beethoven (2006)

Ed Harris gives a commanding lead performance in this fictional account of the last years in the life of Ludwig van Beethoven, as he mentors a promising young composition student.

The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)

Notoriously twisted Japanese director Takashi Miike's darkly comic musical has been billed as "The Sound of Music meets Dawn of the Dead."

Sholay (1975)

This Bollywood classic has everything: it's a western, a love story, a buddy comedy, a revenge film, an action epic, and, of course, a musical.

Singin' in the Rain (1952)

One of the best films ever made, this love story set against the backdrop of Hollywood's transition from silent movies to "talkies" is so much more than just that iconic shot of Gene Kelly hanging off a lamppost.

Sita Sings the Blues (2008)

This animated reinterpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana is set to the 1920s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw.

The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)

An early sound-era Hollywood musical from the great director Ernst Lubitsch, this charming romantic comedy features Maurice Chevalier as a military officer caught up in a love triangle with a musician and a princess.

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

There's no place like home, as you'll learn from this perennial classic about Kansas farm girl Dorothy, who is magically transported to the land of Oz.

Stop by the library and check one out today!

Friday Reads: Transit in the Triangle

Happy Friday! Today our Library director, Dr. Stanley, muses on the evolution of mass transit as he tells us about Transit in the Triangle by Blaine S. Hays and James A Toman.

Being a railfan and a former volunteer at the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum I was elated when I
came across this book. Public transit was used by the majority of the population in the early part
of the 20th century. Not everyone owned a car which necessitated other means to get from one
place to another. In the Pittsburgh area as well as Westmoreland County, before buses came on
the scene people relied on trolleys, also referred to as streetcars. This book gives an excellent
overview of public transportation by rail, showing the evolution of transit from horse-drawn
streetcars to electric powered vehicles. However, progress cannot be stopped and as cars became
more affordable to the general population, the streetcars, which had many roads to themselves,
found the need to share space with not only cars but also buses. The latter two could get people
to places quickly and weren’t reliant on the set routes of rail vehicles. This began the decline of
the rail industry, completely wiping it out in many areas. Interestingly, as mass transit continues
to develop, rail vehicles are seeing a surge in popularity. So the pendulum has swung back!

Editor's note: The Trolley Museum is well worth a visit, even on a rainy day! 

Friday Reads: From Here to Eternity

 We're kicking off October with a Halloween-appropriate read: From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty. Our Public Services Librarian, Kelly Clever, tells us about this unique twist on the travel writing genre. 

Fun fact about me: I sort of grew up in a cemetery. By that, I mean that the "family business" of my family of origin is operating a memorial park. We also took a lot of road trips when I was younger, and my dad took a professional interest in other cemeteries, so we always visited the burial places of the areas we visited. This book is like that but on steroids. And with a lot more discussion of decay. 

Caitlyn Doughty is probably best-known for her YouTube channel, Ask a Mortician. The same funny-yet-respectful, lightheartedly-morbid tone of her videos pervades this book. I'm not very far into it, but so far she has traveled to a remote town in Colorado to visit the only legal open-air funeral pyre in the United States. She has also taken an arduous 30-hour trip to the Torajan region of Indonesia, where dead people are considered still alive for the first few months or years (they're described as ill or feverish but still cognizant) and go on "living" in the home with their families. 

This book and Caitlin's YouTube channel are not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but I find it comforting to reflect on the universality of death and how it is not truly an end. Every culture has rituals around mourning, the treatment of the body, and grief, and in every culture, those still alive must find a way to go on living after loss. I would rather not do that with a mummified body in my living room, but it's nice to reflect that many peoples do not perceive the same rigid division between life and death that modern American culture usually does.