This Sunday, January 31st!
2 pm in the Carnegie Room
Free!
Jim Marshall of C & J Apiary in Dayton, Oregon started bee keeping in the 1980s as a hobby. He says that “by the
1990s, we had bought out another beekeeper and at onepoint had 500 hives; We were seriously
commercial. We are cutting back (down to200 hives!). We have sold honey at the Beaverton Farmer’s Market for 15 years or so.” Jim & Carol Marshall’s presentation will be on the basics of beekeeping, that is, pollination & why
we need to care about honey bees; how to get started including a hands-on equipment demonstration, medications and bee diseases; some honey tasting and a little time for questions and answers.
Books:
&; "b1")
Natural Beekeeping: organic approaches to modern apiculture by Ross Conrad.
&; "b2")
Beekeeping for Dummies by Howland Blackiston
A Spring without Bees: how colony collapse disorder has endangered our food supply by Michael Schacker.
&; "b4")
From Flower to Honey by Robin Nelson. Great kid’s book!
Categories: Event
Tagged: apiculture, beekeeping, bees, Event, Explore Oregon, honey
Set in the volatile world of Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s, The Help, a debut novel from Kathryn Stockett, is full of good food and hidden feelings. The tension between the world of the white and the separate but intersecting world of black people is like a tight wire about to snap. Enter into this scene a naïve, newly graduated young Southern woman full of ambition- not to get married like most of her friends but rather to be a journalist. “Skeeter” Phelan was born and raised in Mississippi, but she is somewhat oblivious to the fragility of the relationship between the whites of Jackson and the blacks that work for them.
Aibileen has always known she would be a maid. Her mother was a maid and her grandmother was a domestic slave before her. She knows how to get the ring off of the bathtub and she has raised seventeen white babies, but what she can not do is get over the death of her own son. With patience and wisdom, Aibileen raises the white children to know they are important for who they are on the inside.
Minny, the third narrator of the book, is an artist with a caramel cake and unable to hold her tongue. This has lost her plenty of jobs and most recently has got her in hot water with Miss Hilly Holbrook, women’s league president and society queen of Jackson. Fearing that Miss Hilly will have her blacklisted from all maid jobs in Jackson, Minny fakes a reference for a job with Miss Celia Rae Foote, a white woman who may be even more alone and isolated than Minny.
When Skeeter decides to write a book which tells the secret life of black maids and their white employers, the three women begin a journey which is always dangerous, often painful and sometimes hilarious. As the women tell their stories, Skeeter’s eyes are opened to the painful truth about her friends and her family who are hiding a secret about their own long time maid.
Kathryn Stockett’s novel reflects her own life and gives insight into a complexity of emotional relationships between people treated unequally. While not presuming to know what it was really like to be a black woman in the 1960’s south, the author does hope that we will realize: “We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as [we] thought.” A good reminder for any place and time.
~Diane
Categories: New Fiction
Tagged: Kathryn Stockett, maids, novel, segregated Mississippi, The Help
“We attach this mysticism and exoticism to the book- we hold a paper book like it’s the only possibility…You can book a book on an iPod or a Kindle. It’s the same story isn’t it? Is there really something mystical about printing a book on pulped paper?” ~ Christopher Harris in “The Future of Reading” Christian Science Moniter Volume 102/ Issue 4 December 20, 2009.
Personally, I would answer Mr. Harris, “Yes, there is something special (“mystical” is such a loaded word) about a printed book”. Far from being exotic, the printed book is a old friend who can fill a book-lover with a nostalgic glow. But none of this disqualifies or belittles the worth of e-readers, audio books, or books available online. It’s comparing apples to oranges in my opinion. Later in the article Mr. Harris states that it is the duty of the librarian to pursue and make available these new reading technologies. I agree with him totally on that point and the results are at your library. Library2Go is available to all patrons- so go load up your MP3 player or iPod with some good books before you head out over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house. Coming in March of 2010, e-books will also be available from Library2Go for you to download to your e-book.
So, I say let’s have our cake and eat it too!
Fun links for book lovers:
~ World’s Best Book Stores (librarians love book store too)
~ Digital Classics
~ Book a colabortation between four artists
~Diane
Categories: News
Tagged: Audio Books, books, e-books, e-readers
For over a year now, we have all be enjoying flowering orchids next to the reference desk on the second floor. A patron and good friend to the library has been bringing them in when they are in bloom and taking good care of them. Modest man that he is, he always says it’s easy to get them to bloom, but we are not so sure about that. We are very grateful to him and know that many other patrons of the library have enjoyed them as well.
Currently, we have two orchids blooming, a giant purple orchid (a Cattleya) and a lovely white Bucket orchid or Coryanthes (similar to the one in the picture above). The both have a lovely smell (although their fragrance is different from each other. Bucket orchids have an amazing relationship with orchid bees that involves perfume, sex and glue (from more information visit this site).
Next time you are in the library, make sure you stop by the reference desk and check out the orchids!
Library Orchids resources:
The New Encyclopedia of Orchids by Isobyl la Croix.
All About Orchids by Elvin McDonald.
The Cloud Garden: a true story of adventure, survival and extreme horticulture by Tom Hart Dyke and Paul Winder.
~Diane
Categories: Event · favorites · nonfiction
Tagged: orchids
Join us Tuesday November 10th at 7 pm in the Carnegie Room for a discussion of the book Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman. It’s a fascinating, quick read- just right for the rainy weekend coming up!
from the book cover:
Twenty years ago, Jane Hudson fled the Heart Lake School for Girls in the Adirondacks after a terrible tragedy. The week before her graduation, in that sheltered wonderland, three lives were taken, all victims of suicide. Only Jane was left to carry the burden of a mystery that has stayed hidden in the depths of Heart Lake for more than two decades. Now Jane has returned to the school as a Latin teacher, recently separated and hoping to make a fresh start with her young daughter. But ominous messages from the past dredge up forgotten memories. And young, troubled girls are beginning to die again?as piece by piece the shattering truth slowly floats to the surface. . . .
reviews:
“Like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or a good film noir . . . Jane’s low-key narration has just the right tone to keep readers hooked.”
–People (Page-turner of the week)
“The strength of The Lake of Dead Languages is a silken prose that lures the reader into Goodman’s . . . story of murder, suicide . . . revenge, and madness.”
–The Washington Post Book World
“PART SUSPENSE, PART COMING-OF-AGE, AND ALL-ENTHRALLING . . . A book that needs the roar of a fire to ward off its psychic chill.”
–The Denver Post
~ Diane
Categories: Adult Book Club · News
Tagged: book group, carol goodman, lake of dead languages, latin, suicide
(image from Harmful Algal Bloom Programme of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO)
How’s this for a scary story? A mysterious killer foam ravages the coasts of Oregon and Washington, killing thousands of seabirds. Actually, the foam is not so mysterious; it is a single-cell phytoplankton, or algae. Toxic algae blooms- when the algae reproduces like made and as a by-product produces a detergent-like substance that strips water birds of their waterproofing oils- have occurred in many parts of the world, but not, until last week, in the Pacific Northwest. So the big question is why did it occur? Was it a freak event or something that will occur again? Are the waters off the Pacific Northwest warming and what will that mean for the future? Anyone who likes to eat shellfish will be effected as the shellfish eat the algae and the toxins are concentrated in them.
Some scary stories are fun because we can relish the scare without the consequences. Not this one.
Further information:
Oregonian article Killer Foam:was it a freak event or a warning?
Oregonlive article
~Diane
NOAA’s National Ocean Service: Harmful Algal Blooms
Categories: Event · News · Uncategorized
Tagged: algae, oregon, seabirds, shellfish, toxic
As the nights start to get chilly and the leaves begin to fall, I always think of one of my favorite books Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Maybe I first read it in the autumn or maybe the tone of the book just fits so nicely with the fading light or maybe the morning fog reminds me of the man with the thistle-down hair. Similarly, I associate Pride and Prejudice with summer and Wuthering Heights with winter. But, I have read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell at least three times, so I must search for another book to suit the season.
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields . “ Bittersweet, beautifully written . . . deliciously unclassifiable, blatantly intelligent and subtly subversive . . . The Stone Diaries chips away at our most cherished, comforting beliefs about the immutability of facts and fate.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
&; "clay")
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. “A page turner in the most expansive sense of the word: its gripping plot pushes readers forward…Chabon is a reader’s writer; with sentences so cozy they’ll wrap you up and kiss you goodnight.”—Chicago Tribune
The Seance by John Harwood. “Harwood’s spellbinding second novel…pays homage to such nineteenth-century suspense masters as Wilkie Collins and Sheridan Le Fanu…Harwood invokes the hoariest cliches of supernatural suspense, from stormy nights to haunted houses, and effortlessly makes them his own.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review )
&; "h")
Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. “A compelling modern-day ghost story set in and around London’s atmospheric Highgate cemetery…An engrossing love story that crosses to the ‘other side,’ Symmetry offers an inventive take on sibling rivalry, personal identity and what it’s like to be dead.”– People (3 1/2 stars)
Poe’s Children: the new horror: an anthology edited by Peter Straub. “Revelatory. . . . A remarkably consistent, frequently unsettling book.” —The Washington Post
Happy autumnal reading!
~ Diane
Categories: Fiction · New Fiction · favorites
