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

Here is our newest book, recorded live at Great River library’s Comic Con event: Crank, by Ellen Hopkins “Kristina Georgia Snow is the perfect daughter: gifted high-school junior, quiet, never any trouble. But on a trip to visit her absentee father, she meets a boy who introduces her to crank. At first she finds it freeing, but soon Kristina’s personality disappears inside the drug. What began as a wild, ecstatic ride turns into a struggle through hell for her mind, her soul, and her life.”

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Check out this episode!

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

Today’s book is The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach. Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing, and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby—young, handsome, and fabulously rich—always seems alone in the crowd, watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life he is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel.”

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Welcome to Happiness in Libraries! Each month we are looking at a few stories about happy things that happen in libraries, or happy things that libraries contribute to their communities.

We are in the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange. We are a multitype library system, and that means we are here to help all 300+ of our members. They are school libraries, public, academic, and special libraries. So they all serve different communities, and overlapping groups of people.

Libraries are great organizations, and can be so important to the communities they serve. Those communities can be an entire city or town that a public library serves, the teachers and students in schools, the patients, nurses, and doctors in hospitals, or whoever else the library community is serving. 

In these little bonus podcasts, we want to highlight some of the interesting and positive things a few libraries are doing! If you have some great things to share, send them to us at admin@cmle.org. 

Thanks so much for joining us this week. It’s so great to have this time to spend together to enjoy the work libraries are doing all over the place! We hope you are inspired to take a few moments today to enjoy your library, and the work going on around you.

Check out this episode!

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

Today’s book is Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, by Mark Kurlansky.

“Cod, it turns out, is the reason Europeans set sail across the Atlantic, and it is the only reason they could. What did the Vikings eat in icy Greenland and on the five expeditions to America recorded in the Icelandic sagas? Cod, frozen and dried in the frosty air, then broken into pieces and eaten like hardtack. What was the staple of the medieval diet? Cod again, sold salted by the Basques, an enigmatic people with a mysterious, unlimited supply of cod. As we make our way through the centuries of cod history, we also find a delicious legacy of recipes, and the tragic story of environmental failure, of depleted fishing stocks where once their numbers were legendary. In this lovely, thoughtful history, Mark Kurlansky ponders the question: Is the fish that changed the world forever changed by the world’s folly?”

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 out this episode!

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

Today’s book is Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

“According to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (the world’s only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655, before she exploded), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just before dinner.

So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing, Atlantis is rising, frogs are falling, tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon—both of whom have lived amongst Earth’s mortals since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle—are not actually looking forward to the coming Rapture.

And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist . .”

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 out this episode!