Julie's Journal : On Overdue Collection

My last two days have been taken up with working on overdue items.  Overdue collection is one of those library tasks that no one wants to talk about.  It's not particularly fun and people can get upset when we approach them about their overdue items.  I thought I would give a quick overview of our process.

Once a month (theoretically - sometimes not quite as often) we print out a list of all the items that we show are overdue.  We divide up the list and go all over the library looking for those items.  Occasionally we will find something that was returned, but somehow missed being checked back in on the computer before being re-shelved.  Those items get checked back in and any associated fines are erased.  We take the list that is remaining and send letters out to the patrons who have the items checked out.  The first month, a patron gets a reminder; the second month, a second notice; the third month, a final letter.  Most items get returned at the reminder or second notice stage and we never advance to the final letter.  If, after the final letter has been sent, we still have not received our items back, we send the account over to City Hall where they go through their own process to retrieve the items or payment for them. 

Now, you may be asking, "What's the big deal?".  Why does it matter if one patron doesn't bring an item back?  There are several reasons that overdue collection is important.  The most important one to my logical, mathematical brain is simply economics.  I ran the overdue report today and the value of the 253 items that are currently overdue is $4,426.54.  That amount is about 1/3 of our yearly book budget.  If we had to replace all the overdue items, the number of new materials we would be able to purchase for the library would be significantly reduced.  Since we are dedicated to bringing as much new and up-to-date material as possible to the library, we really don't want to have to spend money purchasing older items again.  We also want to be able to meet demand, and it is not fun to have a patron request an item and have to tell them that it was due 6 months ago and hasn't been returned. 

We love our patrons, and we understand that sometimes life happens.  We hope they understand when we send a friendly reminder about returning items! 

Chance's Corner: #JesusTakeTheStone

Late last Friday (Jan. 22nd), I was sitting back, relaxing and watching an early-access digital copy of Spectre. James Bond was racing down the streets of Rome, attempting to escape the clutches of the big, brutish henchman named Mr. Hinx, and suddenly... a sharp pain struck me in my lower left back. I rose from my seat and nearly collapsed in the floor. I have a very high tolerance of pain, but this time tears were shed as I wallowed. I knew 007 couldn't even save me.

A Kidney Stone

I was taken to the ER in Mount Pleasant, where I sat in the waiting room for two hours in agony. I started divvying out my personal possessions to my loved ones as I took my dying breaths, until, finally, I was called back. I had a CT scan done, had some blood taken, gave a urine sample and was hooked up to an IV. As the last hydrating drips entered my veins, the doctor entered the room with a solemn face and hit me with the facts. I had a kidney stone (a built-up calcium deposit) ripping the lining from the tube between my kidney and the bladder to shreds. Luckily, it was almost to my bladder, and I was promised the pain would end very soon. 

After sitting and sleeping in the fetal position for three days, the pain has finally subsided. I'm a little sore and drowsy from the painkillers, but my appetite is back and I'm feeling much, much better. I'm not going to be participating in the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janerio this year, though.

Tom's Two Cents: The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

Who is Penelope Fitzgerald?  You don't know?  Well I didn't either until sometime last year, when I became acquainted with her biographer, Hermione Lee, who is president of Wolfson College, Oxford, England, and a distinguished writer and teacher herself.  Born in 1916 in England, Fitzgerald spent most of her life as a wife, mother and teacher.  She began writing in her sixties and published nine novels, three biographies, and numerous essays and reviews.  Fairly late in her short career, she moved from the traditional to the historical novel, writing four such, one set in Florence, Italy, one in Russia, one in Cambridge, England, and the final one, "The Blue Flower," set in Saxony, Germany, in the late 18th century. 

"The Blue Flower" is the story of a short period in the youth of the young German poet-philosopher, Fritz Von Hardenburg, later known as the poet Novalis, and his courtship of a young girl, Sophie, whom he falls madly in love with, when he meets her (she is only 12) in her mother and stepfather's home.  We follow only a few years in his life as he attends multiple colleges, starts to train for a position as director of salt mines, and waits for his bride-to-be to grow up to a "marrying age" of fourteen or fifteen!  (I am reminded of my great grandmother, Eliza Minerva Webb Killingsworth,  married at fourteen and a widow with five children at twenty-one, who it was said, cried that she was an "old woman"!  Remember Scarlett O'Hara's famous consignment to widowhood at the ripe old age of 16?).  Lest you immediately draw the conclusion that this is a "they lived happily ever after" kind of story, it, like my great grandmother’s, is not.

Fitzgerald has her hand metaphorically on the pulse of life, and in this work at least she seems drawn to both its tragedy and comedy.  Family life especially appeals to her, and her insights into those dynamics are both delightful and heartrending.  Witness the opening chapter of the book, entitled "Washday," (each of the short fifty-five chapters has its own title, as in most novels of the 18th-19th centuries), in which a visitor to the Hardenburgs arrives unannounced to witness a panorama of bedding and underclothes floating from upper story windows into the waiting baskets of the servants below!  Sophie herself is a semi-charming, adolescent nitwit, whom no one can quite understand why Fritz has fallen in love with.  Sound familiar?  Well, there surely is a ring of contemporary truth in this old-fashioned story, and Fitzgerald has surely found it.

Fitzgerald also practices what Robert Frost would call "the art of omission," so one must be ever prepared to read between the lines.  This is a short book, as were all her novels, less than 250 pages.  Written in her eighties, "The Blue Flower" was also her last work and her only big American success, thanks to her American publisher, Houghton Mifflin.  Hermione Lee, her superb biographer, describes her as giving "a misleading impression in public of a mild, absent-minded old lady... [but] she wrote in a quiet voice, slipping unpredictably between comedy and darkness."

New Books!

If you come into the library today you'll see us hard at work, putting new books in the system. 

Some of the titles are:

Dumplin'

Strong and Kind

Paula Deen Cuts the Fat

Blue

Grounded

The Only Pirate at the Party

Pete the Cat's Groovy Guide to Love

Owl Diaries

Lenny & Lucy

The Bitter Season

.... and many more!

We expect another shipment today, so check back over the next few days for more titles!

Chance's Corner: The Passing of Alan Rickman

The news washed over me like a wave this morning and knocked me to the ground. Alan Rickman, age 69, died from cancer. My first thought was, is this just another cruel viral death hoax? As I checked more and more news outlets, I knew that it was the truth. Actual tears leaked from my eyes.

Beginning his career on stage and in a few made-for-television movies, Rickman skyrocketed to fame playing the unforgettable villain Hans Gruber in Die Hard. Audiences across the world were introduced to his signature charm and accent, an accent that puts him in the same prestigious league as James Earl Jones, Morgan Freeman and Christopher Walken.

Throughout the years, Rickman went on to star in Quigley Down Under, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and Galaxy Quest, but the role he'll most definitely be remembered for is Professor Snape in all eight Harry Potter movies. He played mean and slimy to perfection, but in the end he made your heart ache with sorrow.

Alan Rickman was a tremendous actor that will truly be missed.

Poet's Perch: Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost

                          

Tom's Two Cents: Charles Dickens' Bleak House

Hovering on the edge of Dickens' late, mature works, "Bleak House" is not a novel for the casual reader or the faint hearted.  It is very long--over 800 pages--there are many, many characters, with multiple plot lines, most intersecting, but not all.  It is, among other things, a murder mystery, but the murder takes place far into the book, so far that a pure mystery fan would have long since fallen by the wayside before he or she got there.  Written in monthly installments for a periodical that Dickens owned and managed, it was very successful in its time and has since come to be judged critically as one of his finest.

That said, I yearned for the earlier days of "David Copperfield" and "Great Expectations," where characters like young David and Pip were immensely accessible, and others, like Miss Haversham and Aunt Betsy Trotwood, were towering in their eccentricity.  "Bleak House," of course, is not a coming-of-age novel.  It treats the legal, moral, and social conditions of its time with powerful accuracy, and, as always with Dickens, addresses the poor and downtrodden with empathy, sympathy and immense compassion.

The major thrust of the story involves a legal entanglement of a will that has been tied up so long in the courts that there seems little chance of its ever unraveling.  But unravel it finally does, and to the detriment of almost everyone involved, including the aristocratic Lady Dedlock, whose early pregnancy out of wedlock later brings her to the brink of ruin.  The other side of that tragic coin, Lady Dedlock's illegitimate daughter, Esther Summerson, manages not only to survive her mother's disgrace, but ultimately to find happiness in marriage to an upright Doctor and children of her own.  Set amidst the broad social panorama of mid-19th century London, "Bleak House" brilliantly captures that time and place.

2016 : Bookish Resolutions

Entering a new year always seems to symbolize new beginnings and new opportunities to reach our goals.  If you are a librarian, some of those goals are bookish in nature.

Our book resolutions are as follows:

Lisa:  To read more biographies. 

Julie:  To finish the book challenges mentioned here. 

Chance:  To read his pile of To-Be-Read books and to succeed in selling a screenplay.

Debbie:  To venture into new genres in her reading.

Christian:  To discover 10 new-to-her authors and to read at least 100 books over the year.

Tom:  To read more books to the end. 

Do you have any book resolutions/goals for the new year?  Let us know in the comments!  We can help you reach your goals!

Goodreads and Bookish Quotes

Are you a member of Goodreads?  If you aren't, you really should sign up.  It is a website of all things bookish.  You can keep track of the books you've read, read and write book reviews, find new recommendations, connect with authors and like minded readers, and just generally lose yourself in the world of books! 

Goodreads also has a bookish blog, found here.  Yesterday's post was a list of ten quotes that had inspired people on Goodreads this year.  #8, #5, and #3 are particularly good.

#8.  "Don't wait for a light to appear at the end of the tunnel, stride down there and light the bloody thing yourself." Sara Henderson (Quote of the Day for September 15)

Don't sit around waiting for something to happen.  If you want something, get out and work towards making it happen.

#5 "Sleep is good, he said, and books are better." George R.R. Martin (Quote of the Day for August 6)

No explanation needed!

#3 "The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go." Dr. Seuss (Quote of the Day for March 2)

We've all heard this quote by Dr. Seuss, but it's worth repeating over and over and over.  And over. 

What are your favorite book quotes?

Merry Christmas!

The Library will be closed

Thursday, December 24th

through

Sunday, December 27th.

We will reopen

Monday, December 28th

We hope you have a happy and blessed Christmas!

Poet's Perch: Christmas Bells by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Christmas Bells

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
    And wild and sweet
    The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
    Had rolled along
    The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
    A voice, a chime,
    A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
    And with the sound
    The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
    And made forlorn
    The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
    “For hate is strong,
    And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
    The Wrong shall fail,
    The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Julie's Journal : Book Challenges

It's hard to believe that 2015 is winding to a close.  For me, among other things, that means that I need to look at finishing up 2015's book challenges and pick new ones for 2016. 

In 2015, I chose three book challenges.  The A-Z challenge, the Back to the Classics challenge, and a TBR challenge.  To read further about my decision to participate in these three challenges, click here.  Back in August, I made this post, in which I announced that I had finished the A-Z challenge. 

My Back to the Classics challenge list is below.  You can see that I finished all but one category. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be reading a 500+ page classic by the end of the year.

My third challenge was a TBR challenge of my own making, in which I wanted to read 12 books from my To-Be-Read shelf.  I failed miserably at this challenge, reading only 6 books from my TBR shelf.  I guess my constant access to new reading material is my excuse for not finishing this one!

So - onward and upward!  I have been researching book challenges for 2016 and have chosen four to participate in this year.

First, I am going to do the Back to the Classics challenge again.  The categories are a little different this year and I'm excited about finding titles to fit them.  Along with a few more categories, I need a classic:

• in translation
• by a non-white author
• adventure
• fantasy, science fiction, or dystopian
• detective
• banned or censored
• short stories

Then, I am going to do two challenges from purpleinkstudios.net.  The first is her Anne of Green Gables challenge, which is as simple as it sounds.  I am to (re-)read all 8 books in the series this year.  The second is her Grown Up Reading challenge.  For this, I am to read books that fit into 20 different categories she has chosen.  They include things like, a biography, a book about art, a book about religion/theology, and a book that won the Pulitzer prize.  For a full list of the categories, click here.  

Finally, I am taking the PopSugar Ultimate Reading Challenge.  This is also a category based challenge, with a list of 39 categories.  The include categories like, a book finished in one day, a graphic novel, a book of poetry, and a murder mystery.  For a full list of the categories, click here.  

I hope to find some books that will fit more than one of the categories.  What do you think?  Do you think I will be able to finish these challenges?  

Chance's Corner: Christmas Movies

It's hard to believe that it's already December, and Christmas is 15 days away. Yikes! Hold on, I have to let it sink in for a bit. *takes in deep breath*

Whew! Now that I've been avoiding Christmas movies since Halloween (I'm looking at you Hallmark Channel), I've got some catching up to do. Luckily, the Franklin County Library has plenty of Christmas movie selections to enjoy!

Here is a list of some of my favorite Christmas movies our library has to offer:

A Christmas Story - I'm starting off the list with probably the most well-known and well-watched Christmas movie (thanks to the constant loop on TBS). Set in the 1940's, Ralphie has his eyes set on an official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle for Christmas. He'll do anything to get it -- including asking his parents, writing an emotional class essay, and begging Santa. Their response? You'll shoot your eye out! Filled with humor, heart and nostalgia, A Christmas Story is a great watch for anyone.

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation - Those zany Griswold's remind us that anyone that tries to pawn off the idea of a perfect family Christmas is living in some kind of fantasyland. We all have that one family member or that one thing that happens that throws a kink in the whole festive season. But it's the laughs along the way that make things just right.

Dr. Suess' How The Grinch Stole Christmas - The cartoon is fine and swell, but Jim Carrey's delightfully over-the-top performance as the Grinch makes this live-action spectacle just as good, as well.

See what I did there?

It's A Wonderful Life - Considered a box office flop and snubbed at the Academy Awards, It's a Wonderful Life rose from the ashes of disaster and is considered one of the greatest films of all time. Feeling down on yourself and seeking purpose? Then this is the film for you.

Miracle on 34th Street - A Santa working at Macy's claims to be the real deal, but skeptics  push dear old Kris into an insane asylum and into court. It's up to Maureen O'Hara and a very young Natalie Wood to save the day!

Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas - When one thinks of Jim Henson, Emmet Otter is tragically overlooked. One of Henson's earlier works, Emmet Otter is a touching tale of a poor mother and son (who happen to be Otters) that sacrifice the things they love to give each other something for Christmas, but in the end the biggest gift of all is love. It's cute, funny and touching.

Christmas With The Kranks - The Kranks have the bright idea of skipping Christmas (to the chagrin of Dan Aykroyd and the rest of the neighbors) and going on a cruise since their daughter won't be home for the holidays. However, surprise! Their daughter is coming home for Christmas to show her foreign lover what a magical Christmas with the Kranks is like. The Kranks race against the clock on Christmas Eve to get their act together, and with the help of their neighbors, they manage to pull it off.

Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer - This is as classic as a classic Christmas movie can get. The songs... the animation.. it all comes together. If you're a kid or not, you'll love it (maybe).

Home Alone - A maybe-misunderstood little boy, played by child-star Macauley Culkin, is forgotten by his family, who are on their way to Paris, France. He mistakes it as a wish come true and has some fun... until a pair of bumbling robbers are determined to break in.

Home Alone is still a fun movie to watch, but to newer and younger viewers the plot can be hard to understand now that times have changed. They may wonder why they don't just use a cell phone to contact a neighbor or their son, and why isn't CPS involved, and why weren't people on Facebook chastising the family for their bad parenting? I guess these qualities make a movie remake impossible. Thank goodness!

There are plenty of other Christmas movies to choose from at the Franklin County Library, but these are the few that are my must-watches to make the holiday complete.

Come let me know what your favorites are!

Painting with a Twist

If you've been around the library the past month, you have heard about the Friends of the Library sponsored Painting with a Twist.  Well, the event was Saturday and was a huge success.

23 adults and 12 kids took advantage of the opportunity to paint either a neon snowman or a trio of Christmas trees.

I think they turned out great!