Tag Archives: Book Bouquet series

Books

Book Bouquet: Get Organized!

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!)

The new year is coming soon and that means boxes of stuff, new gifts to find places for and wading through things that you don’t remember you had. What does that mean? Time to organize. We here at CMLE love to organize and we know library folks do too. So enjoy the book bouquet and get sorted.

 The Complete Book of Home Organization by Toni Hammersley

“Have you ever wished you had the time and tools to organize your house in a clutter-free, design-conscious, Pinterest-worthy way? From storage solutions and cleaning tips to secret space-saving methods and expert strategies, The Complete Book of Home Organization is packed with the tips and shortcuts you need to effectively organize your home.
From small spaces and apartment solutions to how to tackle a big, messy home with a 15-week total home organization challenge, this book covers it all. The Complete Book of Home Organization spells out everything you need to de-clutter your house, store your belongings, and keep your home—and life—in tip-top shape. With high-quality design, intricate detail, and a durable flexicover—this manual is the perfect gift!
Organize the 30 main spaces of your home, including the living and dining spaces, bedrooms and bathrooms, guest areas, baby and kids’ rooms, utility spaces and garages, entryways and offices, patios and decks, closets and pet areas! Keep track of your pantry, holiday and craft supplies, weekly menu planning, keepsakes, and schedules. From the basement to the attic, this book covers every nook and cranny.
With step-by-step instructions, detailed illustrations, and handy checklists, say goodbye to a messy home and wasted storage space!”

 Home Organization Tear-outs for the Whole Family by Kristi Dominguez

“Busy parents and families who rely on home binders know how important organization is. By using the pages from Home Organization Tear Outs for the Whole Family, you can keep all of your important information in one safe place, as well as utilize the lists, chore charts, calendars, guidelines and labels to keep your whole home in tip-top shape. The cheerful and fun designs will get the whole family involved without you playing taskmaster, and make your life easier, less hectic and more coordinated.

Eliminate clutter and organize your home, and turn those to-do lists into ta-da lists. The super user-friendly tear outs are designed to be pulled out, laminated and used again and again. See your whole home sparkle and shine in no time.”

 Get It Together Girl! 28- Day Guide to Practical NOT Perfect Home Organization by Karyn Beach

“Designed for the woman who doesn’t have the time to get organized! Get It Together Girl! uses the time and the money you have to get you the organization you crave. Tired of losing your keys? Scared to eat half the stuff in your refrigerator? Tired of wading through outdated clothes and a sea of shoes? You’ve come to the right place. Get It Together Girl! gets you together in just 15 minutes a day, 5 days a week. Weekends are optional!”

 The Home Edit: A Guide to Organizing and Realizing Your House Goals (Includes Refrigerator Labels) by Clea Shearer

“There’s decorating, and then there’s organizing. From the Instagram-sensation home experts (with a serious fan club that includes Reese Witherspoon, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Mindy Kaling), here is an accessible, room-by-room guide to establishing new order in your home.
Believe this: every single space in your house has the potential to function efficiently and look great. The mishmash of summer and winter clothes in the closet? Yep. Even the dreaded junk drawer? Consider it done. And the best news: it’s not hard to do—in fact, it’s a lot of fun.
From the home organizers who made their orderly eye candy the method that everyone swears by comes Joanna and Clea’s signature approach to decluttering. The Home Edit walks you through paring down your belongings in every room, arranging them in a stunning and easy-to-find way (hello, labels!), and maintaining the system so you don’t need another do-over in six months. When you’re done, you’ll not only know exactly where to find things, but you’ll also love the way it looks.
A masterclass and look book in one, The Home Edit is filled with bright photographs and detailed tips, from placing plastic dishware in a drawer where little hands can reach to categorizing pantry items by color (there’s nothing like a little ROYGBIV to soothe the soul). Above all, it’s like having your best friends at your side to help you turn the chaos into calm.”

 Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff By Dana K. White

“You don’t have to live overwhelmed by stuff–you can get rid of clutter for good!
While the world seems to be in love with the idea of tiny houses and minimalism, many of us simply can’t purge it all and start from nothing. Yet a home with too much stuff is a home that is difficult to maintain, so where do we begin? Add in paralyzing emotional attachments and constant life challenges, and it can feel almost impossible to make real decluttering progress.
In Decluttering at the Speed of Life, decluttering expert and author Dana White identifies the mind-sets and emotional challenges that make it difficult to declutter. Then, in her signature humorous approach, she provides workable solutions to break through these struggles and get clutter out–for good!
But more than simply offering strategies, Dana dives deep into how to implement them, no matter the reader’s clutter level or emotional resistance to decluttering. She helps identify procrasticlutter–the stuff that will get done eventually so it doesn’t seem urgent–as well as how to make progress when there’s no time to declutter.
Sections of the book include

  • Why You Need This Book (You Know Why)
  • Your Unique Home
  • Decluttering in the Midst of Real Life
  • Change Your Mind, Change Your Home
  • Breaking Through Your Decluttering Delusions
  • Working It Out Room by Room
  • Helping Others Declutter
  • Real Life Goes On (and On)

As long as we’re living and breathing, new clutter will appear. The good news is that decluttering can get easier, become more natural, and require significantly fewer hours, less emotional bandwidth, and little to no sweat to keep going.”

Books

Book Bouquet: Zonked!

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.

 

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, by by Matthew Walker. “Until very recently, science had no answer to the question of why we sleep, or what good it served, or why we suffer such devastating health consequences when it is absent. Compared to the other basic drives in life—eating, drinking, and reproducing—the purpose of sleep remains more elusive.

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**k to Sleep, by Adam Mansbach (Sorry for the implied language here; but if you have ever begged a small person to Just Go To Sleep!!, you understand where this tired dad is coming from! I have the audio version of this book, read by Samuel L. Jackson – and it is a delight!) 

“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: Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It, by W. Chris Winter M.D. “If you want to fix your sleep problems, Internet tips and tricks aren’t going to do it for you. You need to really understand what’s going on with your sleep—both what your problems are and how to solve them.

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”

 

Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child: A Step-by-Step Program for a Good Night’s Sleep, by Marc Weissbluth M.D.  (Note: there are a million books that claim to tell parents how to make their child sleep perfectly. My experience with this is: Good Luck. It doesn’t hurt to get some ideas, but we are not promoting any book as the one, true answer to solve any problems. Sorry!)

“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.”

Sleep Tight Farm: A Farm Prepares for Winter, by by Eugenie Doyle (Author), Becca Stadtlander (Illustrator)  (I love the pictures in this one!)  “A captivating exploration of how a family gets a farm ready for the snow of winter, Sleep Tight Farm lyrically connects each growing season to the preparations at the very end of the farm year. This beautiful and informative book paints a fascinating picture of what winter means to the farm year and to the family that shares its seasons, from spring’s new growth, summer’s heat, and fall’s bounty to winter’s well-earned rest. All year long the farm has worked to shelter us, feed us, keep us warm, and now it’s time to sleep.”

 

Dr. Sleep, by Stephen King. (No, this is not really a “sleep” book – it’s the sequel to The Shining!! If you are going to be awake anyway, you might as well have a scary story to read or listen to!)

“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.”

 

Books

Book Bouquet: The Future is Digital

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!

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson “Only once in a great while does a writer come along who defies comparison—a writer so original he redefines the way we look at the world. Neal Stephenson is such a writer and Snow Crash is such a novel, weaving virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility to bring us the gigathriller of the information age.

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.”

Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan “In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person’s consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or “sleeve”) making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.

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. . . .”

Infomocracy, by Malka Older “It’s been twenty years and two election cycles since Information, a powerful search engine monopoly, pioneered the switch from warring nation-states to global micro-democracy. The corporate coalition party Heritage has won the last two elections. With another election on the horizon, the Supermajority is in tight contention, and everything’s on the line.

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?”

 

The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury “Bradbury’s Mars is a place of hope, dreams and metaphor-of crystal pillars and fossil seas-where a fine dust settles on the great, empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn -first a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow. The Earthman conquers Mars … and then is conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race.

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, by William Gibson “Case was the sharpest data-thief in the matrix—until he crossed the wrong people and they crippled his nervous system, banishing him from cyberspace. Now a mysterious new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run at an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, a mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case is ready for the adventure that upped the ante on an entire genre of fiction.

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.”

Books

Book Bouquet: Children’s and YA Books about Native Americans

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!)

It’s the week of Thanksgiving and that often means classrooms and libraries will highlight books about Native Americans. It’s great to want to help students learn more about Native American culture, but easy to fall into using books and activities that promote stereotypes. Instead, read this article and try these tips and books suggested by Debbie Reese, assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and tribally enrolled at Nambé Pueblo.

  • Choose books that are tribally specific

  • Use present tense verbs to talk about Native Nations

  • Choose books by Native writers

  • Use books by Native writers all year round

Jingle Dancer by Cynthia Leitich Smith, Ying-Hwa Hu (Illustrator), Cornelius Van Wright (Illustrator) “Jenna loves the tradition of jingle dancing that has been shared by generations of women in her family, and she hopes to dance at the next powwow. But she has a problem—how will her dress sing if it has no jingles?
The warm, evocative watercolors of Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu complement author Cynthia Leitich Smith’s lyrical text as she tells the affirming story of how a contemporary Native American girl turns to her family and community to help her dance find a voice.”

The People Shall Continue by Simon J. Ortiz, illustrated by Sharol Graves “Traces the progress of the Indians of North America from the time of the Creation to the present.”

 

 

If I Ever Get Out of Here by Eric Gansworth “Lewis “Shoe” Blake is used to the joys and difficulties of life on the Tuscarora Indian reservation in 1975: the joking, the Fireball games, the snow blowing through his roof. What he’s not used to is white people being nice to him — people like George Haddonfield, whose family recently moved to town with the Air Force. As the boys connect through their mutual passion for music, especially the Beatles, Lewis has to lie more and more to hide the reality of his family’s poverty from George. He also has to deal with the vicious Evan Reininger, who makes Lewis the special target of his wrath. But when everyone else is on Evan’s side, how can he be defeated? And if George finds out the truth about Lewis’s home — will he still be his friend?”

We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga by Traci Sorrell “A look at modern Native American life as told by a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. The word otsaliheliga (oh-jah-LEE-hay-lee-gah) is used by members of the Cherokee Nation to express gratitude. Beginning in the fall with the new year and ending in summer, follow a full Cherokee year of celebrations and experiences.
Appended with a glossary and the complete Cherokee syllabary, originally created by Sequoyah.”

Pemmican Wars (A Girl Called Echo) by Katherena Vermette This is the first graphic novel in a new series! “Echo Desjardins, a 13-year-old Métis girl adjusting to a new home and school, is struggling with loneliness while separated from her mother. Then an ordinary day in Mr. Bee’s history class turns extraordinary, and Echo’s life will never be the same. During Mr. Bee’s lecture, Echo finds herself transported to another time and place—a bison hunt on the Saskatchewan prairie—and back again to the present. In the following weeks, Echo slips back and forth in time. She visits a Métis camp, travels the old fur-trade routes, and experiences the perilous and bygone era of the Pemmican Wars.”

Did we miss a book that you’d like to recommend? Let us know in the comments!

Books

Book Bouquet: Geocaching

Have you been geocaching?? We’re into it!

And while we haven’t updated our pages in a while, we have travel bugs out there in the world that are traveling from cache to cache – exploring the fun things they can find!

If you like the idea of being on a constant hide and seek adventure and exploring new places both at home or when you are traveling, geocaching is for you!

You can get all the info on their website, and we have some suggestions below.

We put five tracking bugs out there into the world, to see where they would go when (if?) people would pick them up and move them to new places. We have one that has been doing some moving around lately: Library Travel Bug. Check it out to follow its adventures!

You may need a few items or some more information about geocaching – check them all out at Amazon! (We get a small percentage of Amazon’s profits if you buy things when you click thru that link, so we really appreciate it!)

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Geocaching, by Editors & Staff Geocaching.com “Geocaching has steadily grown into a fun and enduring outdoor adventure and with the popularity of GPS units and the development of applications for nearly all of the most popular smartphone platforms, it has become an adventure that’s available to pretty much anyone.

In The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Geocaching, Third Edition, the editors and staff of Geocaching.com open the world of geocaching up to a much broader audience and take the reader through all of the core essentials for caching including how to play, tips and tricks for finding and placing caches, variations on traditional caching, and much more. In addition, the reader can learn about exciting new changes to the game and the new GPS-enabled games that will take cachers to an entirely new level of fun and adventure.”

 

How To Puzzle Cache, by Cully Long “Faced With A Map Full Of Blue Question Marks And No Idea Where To Start? Geocaching novices and pros alike are often daunted by puzzle and mystery caches. Ciphers, enigmatic photos, nonsensical text, or just a blank page — it often isn’t clear what the Co wants or expects you to do, and even less clear how any of it will lead you to a cache. This Book Will Help You Ask — And Answer — All The Right Questions. 300 pages of lessons, tips, tricks and hints for dealing with even the trickiest puzzle caches, plus step-by-step techniques that start with examining the cache page and lead you through codes, ciphers, steganography, math, music, and dozens of other common puzzle cache types will have you on the trail in no time.”

 

Geocaching logbook, by Journals Unlimited, “Uniquely guided format includes; Find Name, Posted by, Difficulty rating, Terrain rating, Size, Searched with, Coordinates, Information, Hint, Contact geocache owner, travel bug/geocache info, Date Searched/Found/Not Found, lined back-side of page for notes. Each of these guided pages repeats allowing one page for 88 finds. While there are many geocache logbooks on the market that stay with your cache, this is the first of its kind designed for the treasure seeker to carry with them and log in all of their finds.”

 

You might want a cool shirt to wear as you cache!

Not All Wander Lost Geocaching T-Shirt  (available in a variety of podcasts)

 

 

You can use the app from geocaching.com and use your phone to cache; but a handheld gps is more useful. There are lots of different ones you might try; I’ve had a few Garmin devices and had pretty good luck with them. Here’s one for you to get the idea, but there are lots of other Garmins and other brand names. Feel free to browse around other devices if you like different features (fishing info, hunting, hiking, etc.).

  Garmin eTrex10 GPS

  • Rugged handheld navigator with preloaded worldwide basemap and 2.2-inch monochrome display
  • WAAS-enabled GPS receiver with HotFix and GLONASS support for fast positioning and a reliable signal
  • Waterproof to IPX7 standards for protection against splashes, rain, etc.
  • Support for paperless geocaching and Garmin spine-mounting accessories. Power with two AA batteries for up to 20 hours of use (best with Polaroid AA batteries)
  • See high and low elevation points or store waypoints along a track (start, finish and high/low altitude) to estimate time and distance between points

Do you want to drop your own travel bugs? It can be a fun way to interact with people, and tell them about your library or other cool programs!

4 Pack Travel Bugs by Groundspeak