Category Archives: Check it Out:

Check it Out:

Member Event Report!

You know that it’s cold outside – snow, ice, wind…brrr! We want to help all of us to have more hygge in our lives.

So it was great to get together last week, to have food at Mexican Village, and to chat about books with members!

Our format for this group is pretty flexible, to be sure we meet the needs of all members: we sit in our reserved area, and everyone shares a book (or two!) they are reading. People can order whatever food they want. There is chatting on other topics, sharing of photos, an occasional YouTube video watched – all the typical fun stuff!

It’s been pretty crowded at these events, and we are always fine with more people joining us. So here are all the upcoming events. If you sign up on Meetup.com (it’s a free account, and they don’t spam you), you will get reminded of sessions automatically. (I put the app on my phone, and it sends me reminders for the meetings, and even another one a couple of hours early so I won’t forget!)

And of course, all these events will be promoted here on the website, in the newsletter, and on our social media. We don’t care where you hear about it – we will just be happy to see you!

So, the books are the fun part of the event! Here are the books, and other resources we shared, so you can admire them too.

(As always, our book links go to Amazon.com. If you click one, and buy anything at all, Amazon sends of a very small percent of their profits. You can support CMLE without doing a thing. Thanks!!)

There was discussion of a perfume that smelled like old books/bookstore. Here are a few places you can check out if you want to try some book-related scents.

We also had an optional book everyone could read: The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun, by Gretchen Rubin. “Gretchen Rubin’s year-long experiment to discover how to create true happiness. Drawing on cutting-edge science, classical philosophy, and real-world examples, Rubin delivers an engaging, eminently relatable chronicle of transformation. ” We did not get much time to discuss this one, so will probably carry it over to February too. There is always time for more happiness!

Thanks so much for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you at some upcoming events!

Books, Check it Out:

Reading for Human Trafficking Awareness Month

January is National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, “Human trafficking involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act. Every year, millions of men, women, and children are trafficked worldwide – including right here in the United States.” Human trafficking is not the same as human smuggling, which involves illegal transportation of a person across a border.
 
While human trafficking can happen to anyone, people who are already in vulnerable situations – such as youth and people experiencing homelessness – may be more likely to be targeted. 

In St. Cloud, Terebinth Refuge provides a safe space for women that have been victims of trafficking. Learn more on their website or find additional information on this PDF. The Minnesota Human Trafficking Task Force also has information on their website.

Here are some titles to help spread awareness during this month and all year long:

Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls are Not for Sale: A Memoir by Rachel Lloyd
“In Girls Like Us, Lloyd reveals the dark, secretive world of her past in stunning cinematic detail. And, with great humanity, she lovingly shares the stories of the girls whose lives she has helped—; small victories that have healed her wounds and made her whole. Revelatory, authentic, and brave, Girls Like Us is an unforgettable memoir.”

Harvesting by Lisa Harding
“Sammy is a spiky, quick-witted and sharp teenager living in Dublin; Nico is a warm and conscientious girl from Moldova. When they are thrown together in a Dublin brothel in a horrific twist of fate, a peculiar and important bond is formed . . .This is a novel about a flourishing but hidden world, thinly concealed beneath a veneer of normality. It’s about the failings of polite society, the cruelty that can exist in apparently homely surroundings, the bluster of youth and the often appalling weakness of adults. Harvesting is heartbreaking and funny, gritty, raw and breathtakingly beautiful, where redemption is found in friendship and unexpected acts of kindness.”

Slaves Among Us: The Hidden World of Human Trafficking by Monique Villa
“Written by a global leader in the fight against human trafficking, this powerful book uncovers the hidden world of slaves–no longer physically in chains–who walk among us, trapped in a cycle of exploitation. Despite significant progress in the fight for human rights, slavery continues to flourish. In fact, there are more slaves today, in countries rich and poor, than at any point in the past. By giving voice to survivors of this horrific trade, Villa vividly illustrates dire situations we can do something about. Her call to action outlines concrete steps to safeguard the vulnerable among us and to eliminate slavery in our time.”

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
“From two of our most fiercely moral voices, a passionate call to arms against our era’s most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women and girls in the developing world.”

Sold by Patricia McCormick
“Written in spare and evocative vignettes, this powerful novel renders a world that is as unimaginable as it is real, and a girl who not only survives but triumphs.”

Girl in Pieces by Kathleen Glasgow
“Charlotte Davis is in pieces. At seventeen she’s already lost more than most people lose in a lifetime. But she’s learned how to forget. The broken glass washes away the sorrow until there is nothing but calm. You don’t have to think about your father and the river. Your best friend, who is gone forever. Or your mother, who has nothing left to give you. Every new scar hardens Charlie’s heart just a little more, yet it still hurts so much. It hurts enough to not care anymore, which is sometimes what has to happen before you can find your way back from the edge.”

Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy by Kevin Bales
“Slavery is illegal throughout the world, yet more than twenty-seven million people are still trapped in one of history’s oldest social institutions. Kevin Bales’s disturbing story of contemporary slavery reaches from Pakistan’s brick kilns and Thailand’s brothels to various multinational corporations. His investigations reveal how the tragic emergence of a “new slavery” is inextricably linked to the global economy. This completely revised edition includes a new preface. All of the author’s royalties from this book go to fund antislavery projects around the world.”

Check it Out:

Crafting In The Library: Paper Flowers

Libraries do a lot of crafting! Whether you are looking for some good programs, or some fun staff activity, crafts are an easy and fun strategy.

And if the fun of it isn’t enough, crafting can be a great stress reliever! Check out Making Art Is Good For Your Health. Here’s How To Start A Habit, from NPR, for some encouragement in getting started.

Let’s look at a few things you can try out in your library, or take home and experiment. Try some crafting, take pictures, and tell us all about it!

Check out this blog post on making paper flowers from book pages. You’re in a library – you probably have some weeded books hanging around; crafting your available materials is always going to be a good way to go. She has a video to show the technique, and she gives step by step pictures; so even the least crafty among us (*raising my hand*) can follow it.

How to Make Flowers Out of Paper
Using an Old Book

“Prep Time 5 minutes Active Time 10 minutes Total Time 15 minutes Difficulty Easy Estimated Cost $1

Materials

  • Old book
  • Bead
  • Thread

Tools

  • Pencil
  • Scissors
  • Glue

“Other Ways to Make Paper Flowers and Old Book Crafts:

If this project got you excited to try making more paper flowers, you are in luck. There are so many different ways you can do it!

You can learn how to make a gorgeous DIY paper flower ball, or you can use a free printable template to create an easy paper flower wreath. You can even make colorful flowers out of tissue paper.

And here are three more DIY Paper flowers you can make quickly and easily. You’ll find lots more in our archives. So check out these projects and the other easy DIY paper flowers we have shared!”

Try some library flowers this week! Take pictures and send them to us! Send us a flower or two – we will happily display them all!! Flowers can make every place happier, and book flowers are probably the best type for us!

Check it Out:

Book Bites: How to Change Your Mind

Book Bites are quick looks at a book from our Guest Host readers. Try a new book this week!

And this week our Guest Host is admiring the book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, by Michael Pollan.

“A unique and elegant blend of science, memoir, travel writing, history, and medicine, How to Change Your Mind is a triumph of participatory journalism. By turns dazzling and edifying, it is the gripping account of a journey to an exciting and unexpected new frontier in our understanding of the mind, the self, and our place in the world. The true subject of Pollan’s “mental travelogue” is not just psychedelic drugs but also the eternal puzzle of human consciousness and how, in a world that offers us both suffering and joy, we can do our best to be fully present and find meaning in our lives.”

This is our last Book Bite for a while. Starting next Tuesday we will be doing a new quickie book suggestions podcast: Browsing Books!

In this podcast we will be giving book suggestions for our Goodreads challenge/game group: Armchair Travel to Minnesota State Parks. We provide a book prompt for each state park in Minnesota, so you can explore all kinds of new books. And in Browsing Books, we will give you a few suggestions to meet each prompt, and discuss some fun books along the way.

Subscribe to our newsletter, our social media, and our podcasts to stay up to date on all kinds of great stuff! We serve 300+ libraries of all types, and are always ready to talk about libraries and books.

Check it Out:

Travel the US in Book Form: Part Nine

view from Montana hotel
This was literally two steps out my hotel room my first night in Montana this trip. I just sat there, drank tea, and stared at how beautiful it was.

Wow – this is a really big country! There are so many great states, and it’s great to see a book from each state. We are admiring each state in the order I drove to visit them in 2019, and enjoying a book from each state. (It’s not “the” book to represent an entire state – just one that will let you do some armchair travel while you plan out your own fun trips!

This week’s four states are Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Montana. And it is in this corner of the country that things become mind-blowingly beautiful!! Yes, every state has nice parts – even the ones I blew through pretty fast; but these states are VERY beautiful!!! (For Minnesotans: it’s like being on the North Shore, but throw in some mountains and glaciers to make the scenery even better. Great, taken a step upward!)

On my first trip to this area, my brain exploded from trying to describe it; so I started just referring to everything as “real nice.” At some point, words just fail you. I spent a couple of weeks admiring scenery while my husband biked from the Pacific to Glacier National Park, trudging through the Cascades. But it was starting to get a little familiar, and less thrilling. I met up with him one afternoon and (possibly) whined a bit that I didn’t have anything to do. We were standing on the side of a mountain, in brain-bending beauty, and – I swear this is entirely 100% true – he looked at me, held out his arms to encompass all of the mountainous beauty as far as the eye could see, and A BALD EAGLE FLEW RIGHT PAST HIM. Literally, Hollywood’s best writers could not have scripted it better. “Well, yeah,” I said “I guess there is all of this.” And I went back to enjoying it, while listening to my Overdrive books.

If you have not been to the Pacific Northwest, I suggest you start planning now to throw a tent in your trunk, grab a sleeping bag, and head out there this summer!! You will NOT be sorry!

(As always, the links below take you to Amazon.com for more book information. If you buy anything while you are there, Amazon will give us a small percentage of their profits. Thanks, in advance! We could use the money more than Jeff Bezos can!)

Idaho

Reamde, by Neal Stephenson.

It’s not set entirely in Idaho, but a lot of the good parts are. I listened to this on my first trip to Idaho, driving around on all kinds of back roads. This book convinced me I was going to be murdered everywhere I went – but it was great!

“In 1972, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa farming clan, fled to the mountains of British Columbia to avoid the draft. A skilled hunting guide, he eventually amassed a fortune by smuggling marijuana across the border between Canada and Idaho. As the years passed, Richard went straight and returned to the States after the U.S. government granted amnesty to draft dodgers. He parlayed his wealth into an empire and developed a remote resort in which he lives. He also created T’Rain, a multibillion-dollar, massively multiplayer online role-playing game with millions of fans around the world.

But T’Rain’s success has also made it a target. Hackers have struck gold by unleashing REAMDE, a virus that encrypts all of a player’s electronic files and holds them for ransom. They have also unwittingly triggered a deadly war beyond the boundaries of the game’s virtual universe – and Richard is at ground zero.

Racing around the globe from the Pacific Northwest to China to the wilds of northern Idaho and points in between, Reamde is a swift-paced thriller that traverses worlds virtual and real. Filled with unexpected twists and turns in which unforgettable villains and unlikely heroes face off in a battle for survival, it is a brilliant refraction of the 21st century, from the global war on terror to social media, computer hackers to mobsters, entrepreneurs to religious fundamentalists. Above all, Reamde is an enthralling human story – an entertaining and epic pause-resister from the extraordinary Neal Stephenson.”

Oregon

Beezus and Ramona, by Beverly Cleary

These are such fun books! They are older books, but the stories are timeless.

“Having a little sister like four-year-old Ramona isn’t always easy for Beezus Quimby. With a wild imagination, disregard for order, and an appetite for chaos, Ramona makes it hard for Beezus to be the responsible older sister she knows she ought to be…especially when Ramona threatens to ruin Beezus’s birthday party. Will Beezus find the patience to handle her little sister before Ramona turns her big day into a complete disaster? “

Washington

Moon Called (Mercy Thompson, Book 1), by Patricia Briggs

I absolutely love these books! I was beside myself with excitement listening to a later book on the series, driving on a bridge that was being referenced in the book. They are all set in the Eastern part of the state – the side with the deserts, not the lush green side.

“Mercy Thompson is a shapeshifter, and while she was raised by werewolves, she can never be one of them, especially after the pack ran her off for having a forbidden love affair. So she’s turned her talent for fixing cars into a business and now runs a one-woman mechanic shop in the Tri-Cities area of Washington State.

But Mercy’s two worlds are colliding. A half-starved teenage boy arrives at her shop looking for work, only to reveal that he’s a newly changed werewolf—on the run and desperately trying to control his animal instincts. Mercy asks her neighbor Adam Hauptman, the Alpha of the local werewolf pack, for assistance. 

But Mercy’s act of kindness has unexpected consequences that leave her no choice but to seek help from those she once considered family—the werewolves who abandoned her… “

This is a photo from the Highline trail at Glacier National Park, near the Garden Wall. Definitely visit this trail when you are here!

Montana

Blood Lure (Anna Pigeon #9)

In this series, National Park Service ranger Anna Pigeon is stationed at a new park in each book; so there are so many great places to discover!

“Straddling the border between Montana and Canada lies the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park—Anna’s home away from home when she is sent on a cross-training assignment to study grizzly bears. Along with bear researcher Joan Rand and a volatile, unpredictable teenage boy, Anna hikes the back country, seeking signs of bear. But the tables are turned on their second night out, when one of the beasts comes looking for them. Daybreak finds the boy missing, a camper mutilated, and Anna caught in a grip of fear, painfully aware that her lifelong bond with nature has inexplicably snapped… “

There are so many great places to visit, and so many great books to read! Do some road tripping yourself, and get ready for it by doing some armchair traveling with good books!!