Khaled Hosseini Giveaway!

***Linda McGuire wins the copy of A Thousand Splendid Suns.  Congratulations!***

Earlier this week we put tons of new books on the shelf.  One of them was And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini.  The book description on amazon.com says that And the Mountains Echoed is about "love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations."

It has already proven very popular and there is a waiting list to get it.

However, while you wait, why not try another of Hosseini's books.  Today, if you leave a comment on this post or join our blog then you will be entered to win a copy of A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini.  A Thousand Splendid Suns "is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love."

 

Enter today to win!  We will give this book away Wednesday morning.

 

Marvelous Mondays! - Summer Edition

As you know, Franklin County Library has started hosting Marvelous Mondays! where we conduct science experiments and have other fun activities.  We've had a lot of fun on Monday afternoons. 

Magic Milk

Baking Soda and Vinegar

Mentos and Diet Coke



Balancing Nails

However, we are going to change things up a little bit for the summer.  Instead of doing projects that can be completed in just a few minutes we are going to try several things that might take a week or more.  For instance, we will dissolve an egg shell and then conduct several experiments with the egg in its membrane.  We may change the colors of flowers, grow crystals, and sprout seeds. 

Come on by this summer.  You never know what will be going on at the library!



New Stuff!

Today we're putting in some new items!  Below is just a sampling of the new stuff.  Come by and check out something cool!

Tom's Two Cents : War and Peace

The Big One

 

Now that we've gotten you past one thousand pages you're ready to hear about some of the really big ones, and of that group Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is one of the biggest--not just in size but in range and depth of narrative.

Come to think about it, War and Peace combines some of the best features of Lonesome Dove and Gone With the Wind: a story of friendship between two Russian nobles ending in death for one, and a beguiling young heroine whom both are in love with--Natasha Rostov, the darling of an aristocratic family beset with tragedy during the Napoleonic War of 1812.  There are so many parallels to GWTW, in fact, that I've often wondered if Margaret Mitchell wasn't inspired in part by War and Peace some 75 years later: the burning of Atlanta and the burning of Moscow for one.

War and Peace is more complex than the other two novels I've recommended because it has so many characters involved in so many life altering situations.  At first it may seem that the number of characters and their long, unfamiliar names is an unravelable puzzle, but once you begin to sort them out they will endear themselves to you and become just like people you know.  Tolstoy's greatest gift as a writer is his ability to put you in an unfamiliar situation and make it feel as natural to you as one involving the people next door.

Our next column:  short novels are rewarding too!

Welcome Debbie!

Today is Debbie's first day!

Come by and welcome her to the library!

Thought of the day!

 

 

Find more things like this on our Pinterest Page!

This Day in History : May 20th

·         1506 – Christopher Columbus dies, Italian explorer, discovered the Americas (b. 1451)

·         1862 – U.S. President Abraham Lincoln signs the Homestead Act into law.

·         1873 – Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis receive a U.S. patent for blue jeans with copper rivets.

·         1883 – Krakatoa begins to erupt; the volcano explodes three months later, killing more than 36,000 people.

·         1899 – The first traffic ticket in the US: New York City taxi driver Jacob German was arrested for speeding while driving 12 miles per hour on Lexington Street.

·         1902 – Cuba gains independence from the United States. Tomás Estrada Palma becomes the country's first President. 

·         1940 – Holocaust: The first prisoners arrive at a new concentration camp at Auschwitz

·         1956 – In Operation Redwing (shot Cherokee), the first United States airborne hydrogen bomb is dropped over Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

·         1983 – First publications of the discovery of the HIV virus that causes AIDS in the journal Science by Luc Montagnier.

·         1989 – The Chinese authorities declare martial law in the face of pro-democracy demonstrations, setting the scene for the Tiananmen Square massacre.

 

Facts from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_20

 

Painting Giveaway Winner!

The Franklin County Arts Alliance recently teamed up with our Friends of the Library to give away a beautiful painting done by local artist Sandra St. John.  Once again Tom Wilkinson drew a name for us.

And the winner is...

Elizabeth Birdsong

 

 

Julie Baxter, Elizabeth Birdsong, Betsy Cook

Congratulations, Elizabeth!  We hope you enjoy your painting.

Duck Dynasty Winner!

We had our Duck Dynasty/Yeti Cooler Drawing Wednesday!  Tom Wilkinson did the honors of drawing the name.

And the winner is...

Ginna Hopkins

 

Julie Baxter, Ginna Hopkins, Betty Crane



Ms. Hopkins is from Como and bought her ticket at KiteFest!

Congratulations!!!



Tom's Two Cents : Gone With the Wind

Our Great American Historical Novel

Back in the depths of the Depression in the 1930's a petite Southern woman living in Atlanta sat at her manual typewriter, pecking away for years at what would become the great American novel; a story of the old South, set before, during and after the Civil War.  The woman was Margaret Mitchell and her book (all 1037 pages of it), published in 1936, was to make her an overnight sensation.  Her life would change dramatically and would never be the same again.  Later on after she was repeatedly asked why she never wrote a sequel to her famous novel, she answered simply that she never had the time and besides, that she didn't know what happened to her heroine Scarlett O'Hara either!

GWTW as it came to be known is the story of a pampered Southern belle, Scarlett O'Hara, whose safe and secure world is thrown into chaos by the death and destruction of an un- imaginable event, the War Between the States, as it unfolds in northern Georgia during the years 1861-65. It is told from the viewpoint of the women left behind rather than the men in battle, thus its perspective is unique among war novels.  It's not about guts and glory so much as it is about what Margaret Mitchell called "gumption", a quality that she felt separated the survivors of the war from those who didn't, and that is part of the reason that the novel sees its heroine not only through the War but Reconstruction as well.

At this point you may be saying, "I saw the movie!"  Yes, haven't we all, maybe several times.  Produced in 1939 by David O. Selznick and starring Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh in roles they were born to play, the movie adaptation still stands today as one of the greatest films of all time.  But great as it is the film is NOT the book, nor can it hope to translate the richness of 1037 pages into four hours of film--think of it as a fine corollary to the novel but not a substitute.

Finally as NY Times critic Donald J Adams said, "For sheer readability it is surpassed by nothing in American fiction."   And I would add, nothing to this day, except perhaps Lonesome Dove!

Next time: the biggest of them all:  War and Peace.

 

 

Marvelous Mondays! : Mentos and Diet Coke

Have you ever see the explosive effect of mixing Mentos candy with Diet Coke?  Well, Bethany tried it yesterday afternoon with about 10 of our Marvelous Monday kids.  It was definitely a success!

 

 

Many people have done this same experiment on a much grander scale.  Watch the video below for an example.

 



 

Have you ever tried this?  How did it work for you?

Chance's Corner: The Great Gatsby Movie Review

Apprehension. That’s what I felt before the screen lit up and dazzled. Was I going to enjoy Baz Luhrmann’s rendition of the The Great Gatsby? Had I set the bar too high? Was it going to be a butchered disaster? Was F. Scott Fitzgerald going to roll over in his grave? The critics weren’t helping much with their mixed reviews. So, with an open mind and shielded heart, I sat through 143 minutes of one of the best book to movie adaptions ever conceived.

With that being said, I will add a significant side note that this Gatsby is directed towards a younger generation. The set pieces, the costumes, the contemporary-fused jazz and hip-hop music – it’s all so bold, so fresh. It’s just what one needs to generate excitement about taking another look (or first look) at the source material. I may be stoned to death by staunch purists for these wild statements, but so be it. Overall, Luhrmann’s Gatsby has both style and substance. The story is solidly intact among with its quotes nearly taken line by line. However, the explanation for Nick Carraway’s recount of his time with Jay Gatsby is divergent of the book, but interesting to say the least.

Acting kudos go out to most of the cast, with particular interest going towards Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. Leo as Gatsby has never made obsession, tear-welled eyes, and pink suits look so cool before. And Mulligan pulls off the massive task of making the wispy, fickle Daisy likable as a human being. In the end, the two make my heart break as the green light fades into the fog.



 

Summer Schedule

 

UPDATE: The Zoofari on June 24th has been moved to the First Baptist Church gym.

 

We hope to see you there!

Tom's Two Cents : Lonesome Dove

A Western for All Time

In the late 80's while I was teaching Intro to Lit at NTCC I was able to devote one whole semester to a single blockbuster of a novel called Lonesome Dove.  Written by Texan Larry McMurtry and published in 1985, it hit the TV screens later in a remarkably fine dramatization starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones.  In those days a TV show was not automatically released on DVD simultaneously with the series, so I had a period of time to capture the novel with the series as stimulus but not a substitute for the novel itself.

 For at least a couple of years I had a captive audience of students who actually became entranced with reading a big long book; 945 pages in paperback!  One of my students actually wrote on her last paper, "Lonesome Dove is a book I wished would never end!"-- quite a statement, even from a book lover.

Lonesome Dove has pretty much everything you could ask for--as main characters, a couple of ex-Texas Rangers off on a last big cattle drive; Call and Gus are the Yin and Yang of Western heroes with a whole gang of other colorful characters thrown in.  Plus not one but two marvelous female characters, Lorena and Clara, to provide ample diversion and love interest.  LD is both epic and tragic in scope with a rich gold vein of humor running through it from start to finish.  I challenge you not to love it!

Next time: our greatest American historical novel - Gone With the Wind.

Wednesday Fun!

Do you know about Easter Eggs?  Not the colorful, fun, candy filled eggs that you get only at Easter. 

According to Wikipedia an Easter Egg is "an intentional hidden message, inside joke, or feature in a work such as a computer program, movie, book, or crossword."  If you have time, try a few of these. (I found that they worked better in Google Chrome than in Internet Explorer.)

• Type the phrase "do a barrel roll" in the Google search bar for an interesting effect.
• Type the phrase "zerg rush" into the Google search bar for a quick game.  Click on the O's three times to make them disappear and see if you get the high score!
• Type the word "tilt" or "askew" into the Google search bar.
• For you math geeks copy the following function into the Google search bar for an interesting graph:
• sqrt(cos(x))*cos(300x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01, sqrt(6-x^2), -sqrt(6-x^2) from -4.5 to 4.5
• Ask Google Maps for walking directions from China to Japan.  Around step 300 will be the instruction to jet ski across the Pacific Ocean. 
• Ask Google Maps for walking directions from "the shire" to "mordor." You will receive a warning from The Lord of the Rings novels.
• Type "where's Chuck Norris" into the Google search bar and read the first result. 

Please, tell me what your favorite "easter egg" is in the comments below.  I know there are a lot more out there that I don't know about.

Marvelous Monday! : Baking Soda and Vinegar

What do you get when you mix baking soda and vinegar?  A FIZZY MESS!!!!

Yesterday's Marvelous Monday was an experience in mixing the two items and watching the results.

We also learned that it is possible to blow up a balloon using baking soda and vinegar.  We put vinegar in a water bottle and baking soda in a balloon and then stretched the neck of the balloon over the bottle and dumped the baking soda in.  Look what happened -

 

 

The eleven kids that attended had a ton of fun playing with the fizzy, gooey mess they created.  Bring your kids and come see what we're doing next week!

Marvelous Monday's are every Monday at 4:15 downstairs at

Franklin County Library

 

Save the Date : Story Time

In honor of National Children's Book Week Franklin County Library will be hosting story time all next week. 

May 13th - 17th

 

10:30 a.m.

Open to kids up to five years old

 

We have purchased several new children's books that Bethany will be reading.  Look for:

 

 

Bethany will also have a craft for the kids to do after she reads the stories.  

 

We hope you'll bring your kids all week!!

 



Tom's Two Cents : On the Virtues of Big Books

Tom Wilkinson is a patron and special friend of the library.  He taught English at SMU, American Literature at Eastfield College, Art History at Richland College, and Humanities at NTCC.  He is now a retired Professor Emeritus at Richland, where he spent most of his teaching career.  He was born in Mt. Vernon and returned here to live in 1982.

 

We're going to start out with the assumption that you like to read or you wouldn't be reading this column!

But like so many of us you may be intimidated by big books.  Now when I say big I mean BIG--a thousand pages more or less--don't let that scare you, it's just, as they say, one page at a time!

I used to think I couldn't read anything longer than a thirty-minute sit-com.  We are kind of programmed that way these days.  In the 19th century things were different--people led simpler, less complicated lives, they savored the times of leisure-reading, and even looked forward to books in installments, sort of like our TV series programs of today.  They rarely ever thought, "It's too long!"

So if you are game I want to put you to the test.  I want to submit to you for the challenge of long, worthwhile reading the titles of some really long books, present, past and really past, that you might want to take on. For the next few weeks I'll pose them one at a time and see if I can't interest you beyond their length!

Next time: what should be everybody's favorite Western, but it's so much more than that: LONESOME DOVE.

 

After the library closes....

Do you ever wonder what happens at the library after everyone goes home?