Check out this article excerpt about Grace Lim – our hero who stands up to the small-minded dingdongs who want to ban books. Check out that quilt!!

“Grace Linn is a 100-year-old widow of a WWII veteran, a grandmother, and a craftivist. On Tuesday, she spoke at a Martin County, Florida school board meeting to protest the removal of 80+ books from the school library. Her statement has gotten a lot of media coverage, and she was later interviewed on MSNBC, Fox 35, and more. That’s for good reason, because in a speech that lasted only a few minutes, she’s effectively demonstrated what’s needed to fight back against censorship.

“The Censorship Round Up archive is filled with so many ways to help, from voting to calling your representative to speaking up in school board and library board meetings and more. We also have an anticensorship tool lit. We even compiled and updated resources into an ebook: How to Fight Book Bans and Censorship. The resources are there. But it’s up to you to act, and Grace Linn shows exactly how to do that. Here are some of the lessons she provides, from easiest to the more challenging!

• 1) Show Up To School Board and Library Board Meetings
• 2) Speak Up
• 3) Use Your Passions
• 4) Have it Filmed and Spread the Word
• 5) Tell a Story and Evoke Emotion
• 6) Bring a Visual

Welcome to Reading With Libraries!

Thank you for joining us again on our book group and Reader’s advisory podcast! 

We are here to talk about books and share library ideas!

This season we are exploring all new ideas for books and book suggestions, so you can expand your reading horizons, and share more information with your library community. We are looking at prompts from the 2023 PopSugar reading challenge this season. You can read along with their challenge, linked in our show notes, or just enjoy some different books. 

This week’s books are a slightly strange genre – easy to pick out but not always easy to categorize. They can be all kinds of genres and all kinds of different stories, and that is the fun of exploring these books!

Check out our show notes page for links to our beverages, our resources, and the books we share today.

Join this presentation from our colleagues at Northern Lights multitype library system!

Join Denise Lajimodiere, Citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, as She Discusses Her Books

May 5^th from 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.

Via Zoom Link Below

Join Denise Lajimodiere, citizen of the Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa Indians, as she discusses some of her many books:

• Josie Dances
• Stringing Rosaries
• His Feathers Were Chains
• Dragonfly Dance
• Thunderbird Poems
• Bitter Tears

First and foremost, Denise is a poet. Her poems are beautifully written with compassion, insight, and a sorrow. Through her work, we come to understand the joy of loving relationships and the deep anguish experienced by beloved family members and friends growing up as Native Americans. Denise sensitively characterizes stories of the Anishinaabe people she loves. Her poetry opens one’s heart to the timeless voices of art.

Denise Lajimodiere is a true artist. Exquisitely museum quality, Denise’s birch bark biting art is practiced by few in North America. She reintroduced jingle dancing to Turtle Mountain and has won numerous prizes over her fifty-five years of Pow Wow dancing. The beadwork on her many jingle dresses is her own. 

While poetry and art are critically represented in Denise Lajimodiere’s work, she is a scholar and academic. Denise holds a doctorate from the University of North Dakota and taught graduate courses in Educational Leadership at North Dakota State University for many years. She was a principal and educator. Most recently, Dr. Lajimodiere has been interviewed by over 100 news organizations worldwide for her acclaimed title, Stringing Roseries (2019), which brings to light the atrocities experienced by a generation of Native American children attending boarding schools across the United States. Stringing Roseries displays the first map of boarding schools as of 2019.

Please join us for Dr. Lajimodiere’s insightful talk on May 5^th. There will be 3 continuing education credits for all attending.

Everyone is welcome.

Topic: Denise Lajimodiere Presentation
Time: May 5, 2023 03:30 PM Central Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting
https://minnstate.zoom.us/j/97673812138

Meeting ID: 976 7381 2138

That’s right: every week we are going to celebrate some small holiday! We want you to join us in celebrating every week – because really, everyone needs a little more happiness in their lives.

Join us in celebrating the holiday just yourself, and take some small quiet time to enjoy it. Or, take our book and program ideas, and celebrate in a larger way in your library. Take a small, goofy opportunity to have a little more fun today! (We celebrate you in doing this!)

Pets! We love to talk about happiness (see our Monday series: Happiness in the Library) and managing your stress. And pets can be a fun way to accomplish both of them! If you have pets, you already know this. They are extra work, cost money, and bring you some worry – but they more than balance that out by being cuddly or fun or at least getting you up and moving around more to play with them!

And for those of us who can’t have pets at home, what are we supposed to do? Fortunately, the internet is filled with pets of all sorts. One of our favorites is Kitten Academy: Where kittens learn to cat! These foster momcats and babies are all up for adoption (you have to go pick them up in Connecticut) from their local shelter. The cameras are constantly adjusted, so you can see sleeping kittens (pretty frequent!) or kittens running around, playing, and living their absolutely best lives.

Read some pet books today – and share the with your patrons:

• Pet, by Akwaeke Emezi
• My Pet Slime Box Set, by Courtney Sheinmel
• Luma and the Hiccuping Dragon: Heart-warming stories of magic, mischief and dragons, by Leah Mohammed
• Eva’s New Pet, by Rebecca Elliott
• Dog Songs: Poems, by Mary Oliver
• How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You, by The Oatmeal (Matthew Inman)
• 500 Freshwater Aquarium Fish: A Visual Reference to the Most Popular Species, by Greg Jennings

Join us in celebrating the holiday just yourself, and take some small quiet time to enjoy it. Or, take our book and program ideas, and celebrate in a larger way in your library. Take a small, goofy opportunity to have a little more fun today!

This season, we continue to travel around Minnesota, but this time we’re learning about all the fascinating historical sites our state has to offer and giving you a book prompt inspired by each site.  

We will share six book suggestions to meet that prompt, to get you started on reading new books. You can also take that prompt and find any other book to meet the challenge!

“From police station to Civil War training grounds to site of a siege during the US-Dakota War, Fort Ridgely witnessed the tumultuous history of 1800s Minnesota.” We suggest that you read a book about Native Americans.

In our show notes for this episode, we link each book to one of our state’s great independent bookstores: Drury Lane Books in Grand Marais, MN. It gives you a description, so you can get more information about the book to help you make a decision about your reading or recommendations.