Summer Fun for Kids

School is out and your kids are home. How do you keep them occupied? We think reading is a great way for them to spend their summer, but what are some other ways you can keep their bodies and brains active during the summer months without spending a lot of money? Try one of the books below for ideas:

101 Things Every Kid Should Do Growing Up by Alecia Devantier


Active Start for Healthy Kids: Activities, Exercises and Nutritional Tips by Stephen Virgilio


The Activity Book: More Than 300 Kid-pleasing, Skill-building, Entertaining Activities for Children from Birth to Age 8 by Marge Kennedy


Celebration Games: Physical Activities for Every Month by Barbara Wnek


The Complete Book of Activities, Games, Stories, Props, Recipes, and Dances for Young Children by Pamela Byrne Schiller


Cooperative Games and Sports: Joyful Activities for Everyone by Terry Orlick


Make-Believe: Games and Activities for Imaginative Play by Dorothy Singer


More Nature in Your Backyard: Simple Activities for Children by Susan Lang


Paper Fun for Kids by Marion Elliot


Self-Esteem Games: 300 Fun Activities that Make Children Feel Good About Themselves by Barbara Sher


Seven Times Smarter: 50 Activities, Games,and Projects to Develop the Seven Intelligences of Your Child by Laurel Schmidt


Swimming Games and Activities by Jim Noble


And don't forget to check our Events Calendar for fun activities at the library!

Book Review: The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

This is a ghost story. Or is it? The Little Stranger fits into my favorite gothic novel category and is an excellent example of a scary story that is not bloody or gory. Set just after World War II in Warwickshire, England this novel is narrated by Dr. Faraday, a 40-year-old bachelor and country doctor. When he is called out to a case at Hundreds' Hall he meets the Ayres family - Mrs. Ayres, her daughter Caroline and her son Roderick. They are an old, aristocratic family who live in a beautiful, yet crumbling and falling apart mansion. Their financial situation is precarious and Roderick is under extreme stress trying to keep them solvent. Injured in the war, he walks with a limp and when Dr. Faraday proposes an electrical treatment for his muscles Rod reluctantly agrees. Dr. Faraday begins spending many hours with the family administering Rod's treatment and eventually becomes entangled in their strange affairs. Soon, mysterious and tragic events begin to befall this isolated family and Dr. Faraday details it all as it is told to him as he rarely witnesses the events himself. As the novel progresses the reader starts to experience that "something isn't right here" feeling, but it is hard to pinpoint why. Eventually, the family comes to believe that they are possessed by a supernatural force that is trying to destroy them. I loved the pacing of this novel. Waters uses the slow build-up method that makes the reader uneasy and slowly creeped out. Though the pacing is deliberate, I couldn't stop reading and stayed up long into the night to discover the mystery of Hundreds Hall. If you like gothic novels such as Rebecca or The Thirteenth Tale, this is a perfect read for you. It is also perfect if you just want a good old-fashioned ghost story.
-Anbolyn (Downtown)

Summer Reading is Here!

The summer reading programs for kids, teens and adults began yesterday. The teen and adult programs are online this year - visit our homepage for more information and to sign up. There are some great prizes available to win. Join us!

Get Your Grill On!

It’s that time of the year again - time to fire up the old grill and cook some tasty burgers or steaks for your family and friends. Try one of the items below to get some new ideas for your backyard creations!

Al Roker’s Big Bad Book of Barbecue by Al Roker

Bobby Flay’s Grilling for Life by Bobby Flay

Chicken on the Grill by Cheryl Alters Jamison

The Cook’s Illustrated Guide to Grilling and Barbecue

The Firehouse Grilling Cookbook by Joseph T. Bonanno

Grilling for Friends by Cheryl Alters Jamison

The Italian Grill by Micol Negrin

New Grilling Book by Jan Miller

La Parilla: The Mexican Grill by Reed Hearon

Pizza on the Grill by Elizabeth Karmel

The Vegetarian Grill by Andrea Chesman

Book Review: Spent:End Exhaustion and Feel Great Again by Frank Lipman, M.D.

Who wouldn’t want to feel better, more energetic, vibrant and able to pursue any goal you set for yourself? With this comprehensive six week program you can! Lipman bases his advice, diet tools, and exercise recommendations on medically proven studies and twenty years of positive results from his own patients.
Readers are drawn to the short, pithy chapters packed with nutritional data and specific foods that, according to Lipman, will end exhaustion and replenish your energy and zest for life. Each chapter builds upon the last, so you won’t feel overwhelmed with lifestyle changes all at once.
Many photos illustrating restorative yoga poses, relaxation techniques, and a large index and resource section aid the reader with finding specific brands of products or additional information concerning particular health issues. Easy to follow recipes and a ”Foods for Renewal” chapter helps new behaviors stick and helps you maintain your new sense of well-being. The take-away from Spent is to “slow down” and take better care of our minds and bodies, which is great “food for thought” in this stressful time in all of our lives.

-Kathy (Hamilton)

Winning Poem

You can read our poetry contest's winning poem here.

Looking For A Good Book?

Are you always in search of something new to read? Do you like to discover new authors? Consider signing up for the Online Book Club. "Every day, Monday through Friday, you will receive in your email a five-minute selection from a chapter of a book. By the end of the week, you’ll have read 2-3 chapters. Every Monday we start a new book. Sign up and start reading". Click here to begin.

Audiobook Review: True Detectives by Jonathan Kellerman

True Detectives is a Jonathan Kellerman book that barely mentions Alex Delaware, read by John Rubenstein and reviewed by Star Lawrence.

If you are expecting the usual Kellerman fare of a French bulldog-owning shrink and his gay detective friend Milo, bleeepppp…rewind. The True Detectives are half-brothers, one white and still on the force, the other black and now a PI.

Their fathers used to be squad car mates. When one is killed, the other marries the first one’s wife. Mom started out a little hoochy, then married rich. So no pathology to see there, keep on walking.

First introduced in Bones, Moses Reed, the white cop, is neat, orderly, humble and serious. His half-bro Aaron Fox is hip, drives a Porsche, and is a self-styled player. His friends and sources are dotted around “the business,” in LA, which is handy because the two are sort of informally teamed up on a missing persons case of a young college student, which soon leads to various DBs (dead bodies to the innocent), libidinous housewives, skeevy hookers and pimps and a missing infant presumed hideously disposed of.

The wisecracks keep coming and Kellerman’s endearing habit of describing in detail the clothes each person is wearing is intact, thank goodness.

True Detectives only leaves you with one question…Are these guys really detectives? For the longest time, they drive around in cars and mull the people and clues. All that mulling.

On the upside—Blanche the French bulldog is mentioned. She is straight-up cute.

Teen Poetry Contest Winners

The winners are:
1st place: Melissa Hultstrand with "Fear Not the Ground"
2nd place: Nesima Aberra with "Social Caterpillar"
3rd place: Maryam Shakir with "Life, Slacking, Drifting"
4th place: DeeDee Walker with "Sleep"
Congratulations!

New at the Library

Stay up to date with the library collection by viewing our Items Added Yesterday feature. Each weekday you can click on this feature to see what items were added to the library collection the previous day. To view this list just click on Search the Library Catalog on our homepage, then under New Items in the upper right-hand corner, click on More Information. You will see a link for Items Added Yesterday at the bottom of the left column.

Book Review: Helen Humphreys

Helen Humphreys is a Canadian poet and novelist who has an amazing eye for detail and for finding beauty in the mundane. I recently read two of her novels back-to-back and was grateful to have discovered such a lyrical writer whose World War II-set novels resonate with longing and loss.

Coventry mainly takes place on the night of November 14, 1940 when the English city of Coventry was nearly completely destroyed by German bombs. It follows the efforts of two women, Maeve and Harriet, to survive the bombing that devastated the city. There are periodic flashbacks to the First World War when Harriet lost her husband and Maeve conceived her son and how those experiences now impact how the women react to the current war and bombing.

The Lost Garden also takes place during World War II. Gwen Davis is 35, single and lonely. She is a gardener who works for the Royal Horticultural Society in London and is looking for an opportunity to leave the city she loves so she doesn’t have to witness its destruction by bombs. She gets that opportunity by joining the Women’s Land Army and going to Devon to plant potatoes on a neglected estate. Here she receives her first experiences with love and intense friendship, and ultimately, loss. Her discovery of a hidden, overgrown garden and the plants it contains is a perfect metaphor for her experiences and Humphreys’ descriptions of the gardens and flora on the estate match well with her descriptions of Gwen’s emotional landscape.

Both of these novels deal with love, but more intensely with loss and how people let it shape their lives.

As the author herself says “Every story is a story about death. But perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love”.

- Anbolyn (Downtown)

Behavioral Science Made Readable

Behavioral science is a catch phrase that has been in the news lately. Several recent books have popularized these fascinating ideas being used to shape current administration policies. Titles include Freakonomics, The Wisdom of Crowds, Predictably Irrational, Nudge, and Animal Spirits.

Here are the concepts, boiled down to basics: it's hard for people to alter their behavior, even if it would be in their own best interests to do so. To change behavior, society has to:
· Make it clear
· Make it easy
· Make it popular
· Make it mandatory.

Try one of these books that help to explain why we crave chocolate instead of tofu!
-Lynne (Downtown)

Audiobook Review: Valley of Bones by Michael Gruber

Valley of Bones by Michael Gruber revisits Santeria-afflicted detective Jimmy Paz, read by Nick Sullivan and reviewed by Star Lawrence

You are talking with a rawboned Florida woman found in a Miami hotel room where an Arab has just been thrown out of a window and her face changes for a split second, her blue eyes turning black, then back to normal. Did you see that—or not?

If you’re Jimmy Paz, a devil-may-care (my stars, what an expression) detective, whose restaurateur mother is regularly “ridden” by Santeria “saints” and who tangled with a hideous witch doctor in Tropic of Night, you know this might not be good.

Turns out Emmylou has a checkered background, starting with child abuse and murder and ending running a backwater war over Sudanese oil in her capacity as a nun. The woman had such a boring life, it’s a wonder it made it to a book. But it does—in the form of four confessional notebooks she writes out for Paz to keep the devil from making her blurt out wrong information. Yes, he will do that.

Taking the notebooks from Emmylou one by one is her therapist, Lorna, a focused woman who is a hypchondriac and can’t bear to wear a bathing suit because she is convinced she is fat. But Paz likes what he sees anyway and flirtation leads to more flirtation. Will Paz give up his University of Girls, the institution that seems to flourish between sheets, but which he credits for teaching him all the beguiling poetry he seems to know?

Lorna is not big on the University of Girls, but she is also busy trying to stay alive as “The G,” various mercenaries, a rich order of nuns, a former police partner of Paz’s who has found the Lord, a schizzy homeless person, and various other folks scamper around at the devil’s behest. Or is it God’s idea, all this? Emmylou thinks so.

How does it end? You know how to find out. But you may not look people in the eye for a while. You wouldn’t want to see anything weird, would you? And then not see it?

Masterpiece Mystery

This Sunday new episodes of Masterpiece Mystery begin on PBS. The season starts with a new series based on the Kurt Wallander mysteries set in Sweden and starring Kenneth Branagh. Old favorites are also included with new episodes of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot on the schedule. See the schedule below:

May 10, 17, 31 - Wallander

June 21-28 - Poirot

July 5 - 26 - Miss Marple

August 30 - September 20 - Inspector Lewis