In this series, we’ll pick some of our favorite things about Minnesota and share some related book suggestions. (We’re open to your suggestions! Comment below or email us and tell us some of your favorite MN things!)
Let’s continue to choose to enjoy the chilly temperatures recent weather has thrust upon us and take a look at another popular Minnesota pastime: ice fishing!
Book Bites are quick, five minute looks at a book from readers. Try a new book this week!
Today’s book is from Connie: I Am Still Alive, by . This is one of our series recorded LIVE at the Great River library in St. Cloud!
Each week we look at a collection of a few books on a topic. You can explore the books on your own, or use them as a foundation for building a display in your library!
(All the book links below lead to Amazon; if you click on one and buy things from Amazon, CMLE may receive a small percentage of Amazon’s profits. Thanks!)
We often use a random word generator to come up with these topics, and when I clicked it and came up with the word Zonked, it was wonderful!
It’s cold outside, the days are still getting shorter, and all of this makes me want to take extra naps. And I read all the time about the sleep shortage too many of us experience on a regular basis. But sleep is important! And it’s a wonderful thing! So, this week let’s look at some books about a lovely winter activity (to carry over all year): sleep.
Within the brain, sleep enriches a diversity of functions, including our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions. It recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, fine-tunes our metabolism, and regulates our appetite. Dreaming creates a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge, inspiring creativity.
In this “compelling and utterly convincing” (The Sunday Times) book, preeminent neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker provides a revolutionary exploration of sleep, examining how it affects every aspect of our physical and mental well-being. Charting the most cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs, and marshalling his decades of research and clinical practice, Walker explains how we can harness sleep to improve learning, mood and energy levels, regulate hormones, prevent cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes, slow the effects of aging, and increase longevity. He also provides actionable steps towards getting a better night’s sleep every night.”
“Go the F*** to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don’t always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. Profane, affectionate, and radically honest, California Book Award-winning author Adam Mansbach’s verses perfectly capture the familiar–and unspoken–tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. In the process, they open up a conversation about parenting, granting us permission to admit our frustrations, and laugh at their absurdity.
With illustrations by Ricardo Cortes, Go the F*** to Sleep is beautiful, subversive, and pants-wettingly funny–a book for parents new, old, and expectant. You probably should not read it to your children.”
The Sleep Solution is an exciting journey of sleep self-discovery and understanding that will help you custom design specific interventions to fit your lifestyle. Drawing on his twenty-four years of experience within the field, neurologist and sleep expert W. Chris Winter will help you…
• Understand how sleep works and the ways in which food, light, and other activities act to help or hurt the process
• Learn why sleeping pills are so often misunderstood and used incorrectly—and how you can achieve your best sleep without them
• Incorporate sleep and napping into your life—whether you are a shift worker, student, or overcommitted parent
• Think outside the box to better understand ways to treat a multitude of
conditions—from insomnia to sleep apnea to restless leg syndrome and circadian sleep disorders
• Wade through the ever-changing sea of sleep technology and understand its value as it relates to your own sleep struggles”
“Dr. Marc Weissbluth, one of the country’s leading pediatricians, overhauls his groundbreaking approach to solving and preventing your children’s sleep problems, from infancy through adolescence. In Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, he explains with authority and reassurance his step-by-step regime for instituting beneficial habits within the framework of your child’s natural sleep cycles. Rewritten and reorganized to deliver information even more efficiently, this valuable sourcebook contains the latest research on
• the best course of action for sleep problems: prevention and treatment
• common mistakes parents make trying to get their children to sleep
• different sleep needs for different temperaments
• stopping the crybaby syndrome, nightmares, bedwetting, and more
• ways to get your baby to fall asleep according to her internal clock—naturally
• handling nap-resistant kids and when to start sleep-training
• why both night sleep and day sleep are important
• obstacles for working moms and children with sleep issues
• the father’s role in comforting children
• how early sleep troubles can lead to later problems
• the benefits and drawbacks of allowing kids to sleep in the family bed
Rest is vital to your child’s health, growth, and development. Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child outlines proven strategies that ensure good, healthy sleep for every age.”
“On highways across America, a tribe of people called the True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless—mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and spunky twelve-year-old Abra Stone learns, the True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the steam that children with the shining produce when they are slowly tortured to death.
Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel, where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father’s legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant shining power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes “Doctor Sleep.”
Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan’s own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra’s soul and survival. This is an epic war between good and evil, a gory, glorious story that will thrill the millions of devoted readers of The Shining and satisfy anyone new to this icon in the King canon.”
Book Bites are quick, five minute looks at a book from readers. Try a new book this week!
Today’s book is from Beth:Lethal White, by Robert Galbraith.
Each week we look at a collection of a few books on a topic. You can explore the books on your own, or use them as a foundation for building a display in your library!
(All the book links below lead to Amazon; if you click on one and buy things from Amazon, CMLE may receive a small percentage of Amazon’s profits. Thanks!)
Guys, we are living in the future! The world has moved online, and there are so many amazing things possible in a digital world!! So this week, let’s look at books that helped us to envision and to enjoy the digital world. Scifi, cyberpunk – these are some fun genres to explore, and they helped to pave the way for the world we have now as well as the world we are moving toward.
Let’s get digital!
In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo’s CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he’s a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that’s striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse.”
Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched one hundred eighty light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats “existence” as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning. . . .”
With power comes corruption. For Ken, this is his chance to do right by the idealistic Policy1st party and get a steady job in the big leagues. For Domaine, the election represents another staging ground in his ongoing struggle against the pax democratica. For Mishima, a dangerous Information operative, the whole situation is a puzzle: how do you keep the wheels running on the biggest political experiment of all time, when so many have so much to gain?”
Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a classic work of twentieth-century literature whose extraordinary power and imagination remain undimmed by time’s passage. In connected, chronological stories, a true grandmaster once again enthralls, delights and challenges us with his vision and his heart-starkly and stunningly exposing in brilliant spacelight our strength, our weakness, our folly, and our poignant humanity on a strange and breathtaking world where humanity does not belong.”
Neuromancer was the first fully-realized glimpse of humankind’s digital future—a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations.”
