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Books

We Heart MN: Umbrellas!

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!)

Part of the journey from winter to summer is that in-between time full of melting snow, puddles, and rain showers. That’s why this week we’re looking at some great books featuring umbrellas!

Umbrella by Taro Yashima
This book was nominated for the Caldecott award in 1959,
“Momo can’t wait to use the red boots and umbrella she received on her birthday. All she needs now is a rainy day! Soft illustrations portray a thoughtful story about patience and growing independence.”

Harper and the Scarlet Umbrella by Cerrie Burnell
“Harper lives in the City of Clouds with her Great Aunt Sassy and her beloved cat Midnight. When Midnight goes missing – together with all the cats of the neighbourhood – Harper realises that only her magical scarlet umbrella can help her find him…
When Harper steps out with the umbrella in her hand, she is carried up into the sky on a series of amazing adventures.”

My Most Excellent Year by Steve Kluger
“Meet T.C., who is valiantly attempting to get Alejandra to fall in love with him; Alejandra, who is playing hard to get and is busy trying to sashay out from under the responsibilities of being a diplomat’s daughter; and T.C.’s brother Augie, who is gay and in love and everyone knows it but him.”

The Umbrella Man and Other Stories by Roald Dahl
“The Umbrella Man and Other Stories is a collection of thirteen short stories selected for teenagers from Dahl’s adult works. By turns shocking, ironic, humorous, and touching, these stories are filled with bizarre twists and unexpected delights.”

Dearly, Departed by Lia Habel
“The year is 2195. The place is New Victoria – a high-tech nation modeled on the manners, mores, and fashions of an antique era. A teenager in high society, Nora Dearly is far more interested in military history and her country’s political unrest than in tea parties and debutante balls. But after her beloved parents die, Nora is left at the mercy of her domineering aunt, a social-climbing spendthrift who has squandered the family fortune and now plans to marry her niece off for money. For Nora, no fate could be more horrible – until she’s nearly kidnapped by an army of walking corpses.”

Books

We Heart MN: Books inspired by MN art museums

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!)

This week we will take a look at some Minnesota art museums! While these books might not be about the museum itself, they are connected in some way! Enjoy!

Inspired by the Tweed Museum of Art in Duluth:

The Way of Cheng-Khee Chee: Paintings 1974 – 2014
This full-color, 72-page book and exhibition catalog features reproductions of 39 of the artist’s most important works, depicting 40 years of exceptional artistic reproduction. Also, there is a section that illustrates in detail the artist’s unique technical innovations.
Contributors to the publication include essays by curator Peter Spooner and artist scholar Ann Klefstad who address the subject of Cheng-Khee Chee’s artistic development, as well as how Chinese and Western styles and spirituality have influenced the artist’s paintings.
This book includes images of high quality of art reproduction. Each artwork has been digitally scanned, bypassing an intermediate photographic step. Thus the images are sharper and truer in color quality than any previous publication containing Cheng-Khee Chee artworks.

Old Turtle by Douglas Wood, Cheng-Khee Chee (Illustrator)
“Old Turtle first burst upon the publishing scene in 1992, and it was instantly recognized as a classic fable about ecology, peace, and the interconnectedness of all beings. Simple yet profound, it has since brought hope and inspiration to children and adults around the world.”

Inspired by the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis:


Russian Fairy Tales: Palekh Painting by Alexei Orleansky
“The best fairytales from the treasure chest of world literature, accompanied by illustrations by the master of Palekh painting. “

Inspired by the Mill City Museum in Minneapolis:


Mill City: A Visual History Of The Minneapolis Mill District by Kate Roberts, Shannon Pennefeather
“In Mill City, explorers, excursionists, early settlers, entrepreneurs, and laborers tell the story of St. Anthony Falls in their own words. Their vivid accounts are paired with historic photographs and artworks that bring their experiences to life.”

Books

Diverse Book Suggestions for All Grade Levels

Making sure your students have access to a wide variety of reading materials is an important part of library work. This list from Edutopia can help! Created with input from teachers, the list features diverse book titles for all grades and reading levels.

From the article:
“We hope they reflect human diversity in the broadest sense, addressing race and ethnicity, religion, sexual identity, socioeconomic status, and other special circumstances.”

We’ll share a few titles here to give you an idea of the list:

Grades Pre-K – 2: We Are Family by Patricia Hegarty
“Through illness and health, in celebration and disappointment, families stick together. Some families are made up of many people, and some are much smaller. Sometimes family members look like each other, and sometimes they don’t! But even though every family is different, the love is all the same.”

Grades 3 – 5: Drita, My Homegirl by Jenny Lombard
“Fleeing war-torn Kosovo, ten-year-old Drita and her family move to America with the dream of living a typical American life. But with this hope comes the struggle to adapt and fit in. How can Drita find her place at school and in her new neighborhood when she doesn’t speak any English? Meanwhile, Maxie and her group of fourth-grade friends are popular in their class, and make an effort to ignore Drita. So when their teacher puts Maxie and Drita together for a class project, things get off to a rocky start. But sometimes, when you least expect it, friendship can bloom and overcome even a vast cultural divide. “

Grades 6 – 8: The Arrival by Shaun Tan
“Shaun Tan evokes universal aspects of an immigrant’s experience through a singular work of the imagination. He does so using brilliantly clear and mesmerizing images. Because the main character can’t communicate in words, the book forgoes them too. But while the reader experiences the main character’s isolation, he also shares his ultimate joy.”

Grades 9 – 12: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family.

Resources

Resources and Books for Women’s History Month!

March is Women’s History Month! So we have a list of great books and resources for you to use in your library or media center, during this month and all year long!

  • WomensHistoryMonth.gov is a great place to start. The site features a ton of materials for teachers, audio and visual resources in a variety of different subjects, and many different exhibits and collections to explore!
  • NCTE has this great page full of resources for English teachers looking to incorporate female writers and characters into their classroom.
  • The Biodiversity Heritage Library will be starting a very cool program on March 8th called “Her Natural History: A Celebration of Women in Natural History” with the goal of increasing awareness and knowledge of the many contributions women have made to the field of biodiversity research.
  • Visit the NASA Women of STEM site to learn more about the women working in engineering, technology, and more at NASA.
  • Book Riot has this video recommending five contemporary women authors to read this month! (I will second the recommendations for Samantha Irby and V.E. Schwab!)

This list from Romper is full of picture book biographies of women, including The Bravest Woman in America by Marissa Moss.

Bustle has this great list of biographies of interesting women from history aimed at adult readers, including Empress Dowager Cixi by Jung Chang.

Finally, the San Francisco Public Library has assembled this list of books for teens to celebrate Women’s History Month, including Lies We Tell Ourselves by Robin Talley

Books

Music Book Mash-Up: January

In this series, we are going to share a fun variety of books about music! Even if you don’t play an instrument (or don’t play an instrument well) you can still absolutely be a music lover. So check back each month for a different collection of books all relating in some way to music! We’ll share fiction and nonfiction titles and try to cover many different genres and time frames. Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments! Happy reading (and listening, and playing!)

We’ll start things off with a picture book that looks truly delightful:

Skit-Scat Raggedy Cat: Ella Fitzgerald by Roxane Orgill, Sean Qualls (Illustrator)

When Ella Fitzgerald danced the Lindy Hop on the streets of 1930s Yonkers, passersby said good-bye to their loose change. But for a girl who was orphaned and hungry, with raggedy clothes and often no place to spend the night, small change was not enough. One amateur night at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, Ella made a discovery: the dancing beat in her feet could travel up and out of her mouth in a powerful song —and the feeling of being listened to was like a salve to her heart. With lively prose, Roxane Orgill follows the gutsy Ella from school-girl days to a featured spot with Chick Webb’s band and all the way to her number-one radio hit “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” Jazzy mixed-media art by illustrator Sean Qualls brings the singer’s indomitable spirit to life.

Next, a book that explores the many contributions of women to the world of country music:

Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives by Holly Gleason (Editor)

Full-tilt, hardcore, down-home, and groundbreaking, the women of country music speak volumes with every song. From Maybelle Carter to Dolly Parton, k.d. lang to Taylor Swift–these artists provided pivot points, truths, and doses of courage for women writers at every stage of their lives. Whether it’s Rosanne Cash eulogizing June Carter Cash or a seventeen-year-old Taylor Swift considering the golden glimmer of another precocious superstar, Brenda Lee, it’s the humanity beneath the music that resonates.

Here are deeply personal essays from award-winning writers on femme fatales, feminists, groundbreakers, and truth tellers.
Part history, part confessional, and part celebration of country, Americana, and bluegrass and the women who make them, Woman Walk the Line is a very personal collection of essays from some of America’s most intriguing women writers. It speaks to the ways in which artists mark our lives at different ages and in various states of grace and imperfection–and ultimately how music transforms not just the person making it, but also the listener.

And finally, a book recommendation that I also found was on many “best of” lists:

Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine by Joe Hagan

A delicious romp through the heyday of rock and roll and a revealing portrait of the man at the helm of the iconic magazine that made it all possible, with candid look backs at the era from Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Elton John, Bono, Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, and others.

The story of Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone’s founder, editor, and publisher, and the pioneering era he helped curate is told here for the first time in glittering, glorious detail.

Supplemented by a cache of extraordinary documents and letters from Wenner’s personal archives, Sticky Fingers depicts an ambitious, mercurial, wide-eyed rock and roll fan of who exalts in youth and beauty and learns how to package it, marketing late sixties counterculture as a testament to the power of American youth. The result is a fascinating and complex portrait of man and era, and an irresistible biography of popular culture, celebrity, music, and politics in America.