Book groups at home

Do you want to start a book group or are you already in a group but are having trouble getting books for your group? The Utah State Library will now help you get books. Visit their site for a list of books they carry or to suggest a title.  They lend books to groups, libraries, organizations, schools, community centers, and/or book clubs meeting in a public place and is free to participants. They have recently decided that they will also furnish books for clubs meeting in a home. They do request that the books be sent back and forth through library services. Their newest titles include: The Help, Unbroken, Hunger Games, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Take a look at their site at http://library.utah.gov/programs/ill/bookbuzz.html

Susan

BookGroup for Kids and Parents

If you would like to continue this Parents as Teachers theme, please consider attending the Parent and Child BookGroup. It's easy!

1. Sign up at the front desk at the library,

2. Get your book and read it together or seperately

3. Discuss the book between you and your child

4. Come to the Library on February 14th at 7:00 and share your thoughts.

That's it! Join us for some fun and snacks. For more information contact Connie Edwards at the Brigham City Library 26 E. Forest Brigham City at 435-723-5850.

HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE!

LibraryThing - Staff Reccomendations and Online Discussion Group

Looking for book recommendations? We'll we've got a bunch for you. You may already know about the Librarians' Bookshelf, which is an eNewsletter we send out monthly either via e-mail or RSS. This eNewsletter typically has less than 25 recommendations on it each month, but we are now putting the books that appear on the Librarians' Bookshelf eNewsletter (our staff picks) into a larger list of 200 recommendations that is viewable on LibraryThing.

What is LibraryThing? LibraryThing is a social networking site where people can sign-up for a free account and create their own catalog of up to 200 books. They can join online book groups to take part in discussions with other book lovers all around the world. In fact, we've just created a group too! It's called "Brigham City Reads" and it's just getting started. We'd love to make it a place where you can get online to share books you loved with others in the community. I'm hoping that it will come in handy for each of us when we just don't know what to read next. You may get to know other group members by their screen names and find that you like a lot of the books they do. Or maybe something someone says about a book or an author will make you want to give a new book a try.

A LibraryThing group is a great place to talk about books or things that have an obvious association to a book. It's a great way to have an informal chat about the books you're reading or one you're considering. I sometimes finish a book and wonder if other readers came away from it feeling the same as I did. What a great opportunity to try to find out! And you can be as anonymous as you choose. You can use your real name or make your user name something that few, if any, will recognize as you.

Very few rules apply. In the discussion rooms you can say whatever you like, as long as you're nice and don't say offensive things. If you say inappropriate things, other users may flag you, and when enough do, LibraryThing may remove your comment. The library has formed the online group, but individual users are responsible for their own statements.

We've also got a link to the library's LibraryThing 'library'. On the side bar of our blog you'll see some book covers (from our LibraryThing 'library') and right above them you'll see a hyper link called "My Library" that will take you into the complete list of 200 recommendations from our staff. Or you can just click on the "Thingamabrarian" icon to get to the our 'library' as well. As we get new lists of recommendations we'll delete some of the old ones so the list will remain updated.

I signed up for an account of my own not too long ago and have joined a few groups. It's been kind of fun. Sign-up for an account and you can connect with authors, put a widget on your own blog that shows books from your library, and discuss books with other readers. Some of the authors on LibraryThing include: Susan Wittig Albert, Joe Hill, and Sherryl Woods. There are groups to discuss certain author's works as well as certain genre's (i.e. mysteries, thrillers, romance, fantasy, sci-fi). Why not sign-up and see what's there for you, after all, it is free!

If you love books and love sharing them with others or just talking about them, come and join the group now!

Elizabeth

The day that changed the world

by: Michele, Children's Librarian

My book group was reading the book 102 Minutes: The untold story of the fight to survive inside the Twin Towers, written by two New York City journalists, Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn.

This book tells of the men and women who saved themselves and others in the final minutes before the World Trade Towers collapsed on September 11, 2001, and includes testimonies from workers in the buildings, police and fire personnel, a construction manager, and a window washer.

Amazing stories of friends who stayed behind with people whom they knew would never get out and of cell phone calls to loved ones from people who knew they were trapped. I cried when I read these very real and very personal accounts of real life heroes.

If September 11th, or Patriot day, as it is listed on my calendar, seems like a long time ago and not important in today's world, stop and read about these amazing events. This books gives details of the Twin Towers and helps you understand the background of the buildings. The local building codes that played a role in the placement of the staircases in the building and the 1993 bombing in the Trade Center Parking Garages the affected the way workers in the building reacted when the buildings were hit.

This book is one of my favorites. My book group recalled being glued to their televisions for days, hoping that some of these trapped people would be found alive and saved. We reflected on the fragility of life, and how that day was a regular work day like any other. The people who worked in these buildings got up and got ready for their day without knowing what fate was going to do to them and to their families and to their nation. We concluded that we need to remember to take time to appreciate our families and our life.

If September 11th is made a national holiday and patriot day becomes official, I think that it should be a day to celebrate our blessing and spend time with those we love. What do you think?

Old Books, Rare Friends to be Discussed at BookGroup.

This Thursday, May 3, 2007, at 7 p.m. the Brigham City Library will be having it's monthly reading/discussion program on Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths and Their Shared Passion by Madeline B. Stern and Leona Rosstenburg. Dr. Jan Frost, emeritius, Univerity of Utah, will be leading the discussion.

This small volume is so rich in anecdote, so warm with a loving friendship of many decades, so precise in its evocative descriptions of the rare-book trade from the 1930s to the present, that it is hard to imagine any reader who would not find pleasure in it. Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern, who are the firm of Leona Rostenberg Rare Books, are now in their 80s, but their elegant writing and limpid descriptions of growing up in Manhattan and the Bronx, studying at Barnard, NYU, and Columbia, and touring Europe as young women show no signs of age. It is to Stern's scholarship that we owe the current rage for the non^-Little Women writings of Louisa May Alcott; it is to Rostenberg that we owe the notion that early printer-publishers influenced scholarship. Her adviser at Columbia had rejected her dissertation upon that topic: she was only granted her degree 30 years later. Their individual voices make both harmony and counterpoint in this joint autobiography; we are wiser and more blessed for the words and journeys they have shared

Next month the title to be discussed is one of my favorite titles from this series: Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama, and Other Page-Turning Adventures from a Year in a Bookstore by Suzanne Strempek Shea.

This program is free and open to the public. It is funded by Brigham City Library and Utah Humanities Council. You need not have a library card to check out our next title. Come and enjoy!

Sue