The Gold Mine Fall Opening is on! Starting September 22…come in and get your autumn on…with all new apparel, shoes, gloves, home décor, kitchen, sporting goods, kids’ stuff, and more. https://comlib.org/gold-mine-stores/
Book Review: “Tess of the Road”
Sara Zagorski, Gold Mine Thrift Store Retail Manager, recommends Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman.
Do you like intense character development, rebellion against the system, humanoid, sentient reptilian creatures and mystical adventures? Well, have I got the book for you.
Tess is a twin sister in an affluent family who’s resigned herself to the official title of black sheep. After spending her youth seeking out all the things women of her rank have no business being affiliated with—sneaking out to lectures concerning the world and its mysterious workings, hanging with boys in taverns, making friends with the creatures the rest of society has deemed “lesser”—until an accident leaves her forever disgraced in the eyes of her staunchly religious mother.
Tess of the Road made me feel a full range of emotions—sad, happy, annoyed, angry—a range I certainly didn’t give it permission to make me feel but…here we are.
Tess spends years coping by losing herself in wine while trying to take up as little space as possible in the shadow of her perfect twin sister. That is until, on the eve of her being shipped off to a nunnery, she finally loses what tenuous control of herself she’s maintained all these years and runs away.
While on the road, no destination in mind, she connects with friends both new and old, makes peace with her past, and accomplishes more than she could’ve ever dreamt had she stayed locked in the confines of what other people believed she should be.
Tess of the Road made me feel a full range of emotions—sad, happy, annoyed, angry—a range I certainly didn’t give it permission to make me feel but…here we are.
And I am very thankful to have experienced them all. Please give this book a read if you’re in need of a well-rounded heroine growing into herself and battling personal demons while in the midst of an exciting adventure. I have also, just now, learned there is a sequel! So it appears I have another book to check out.
Deep Listening Workshop
with Karima Walker
Hemingway Writer-In-Residence Karima Walker leads a workshop in Deep Listening, a helpful tool for those who want to broaden their sensory and cognitive range. In this workshop we will be collectively sounding and listening, communicating and moving alongside each other and the environment around us. Come ready for gentle movement and with a yoga mat or blanket.
Deep Listening is a meditative and musical compositional practice developed by the late contemporary composer Pauline Oliveros, utilizing listening, moving and dreaming to expand one’s awareness of the wider environment, as well as one’s own inner and bodily world. Deep Listening can be a helpful tool for just about anyone, but especially artists and creative folks who want to broaden their sensory and cognitive range in approaching their creative work. In this workshop we will be collectively sounding and listening, communicating and moving alongside each other and the environment around us.
No registration required.
The group will meet in the Library’s Lecture Hall, but may also spend time outdoors on the 4th Street Lawn (weather permitting).
This event is sponsored in part by the Deep Listening® Institute.
“The Line Becomes a River”
with Francisco Cantú
For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Driven to understand the hard realities of the landscape he loves, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Plagued by a growing awareness of his complicity in a dehumanizing enterprise, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the full extent of the violence it wreaks, on both sides of the line.
Hemingway Writer-In-Resident Francisco Cantú joins us to discuss his book, The Line Becomes A River: Dispatches From the Border, which was named a Top 10 Book of 2018 by NPR and The Washington Post, was winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Current Interest, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Nonfiction Award.
Two special guests will also join Cantú to discuss their organizations’ work in our community. Alejandra Hernandez is Executive Director at Unity Alliance of Southern Idaho, a Twin Falls-based nonprofit that promotes understanding of the value of all immigrants and their contributions to the region’s competitive economy, workforce, and communities. Luis Campos is an attorney with The Alliance of Idaho, a Wood River Valley-based nonprofit working to protect the human rights of immigrants and their families and building safe, just, and welcoming communities for all. Campos represents clients across the U.S. and globally in all areas of U.S. immigration law, international human rights law, and related compliance law for organizations working with foreign nationals and/or in foreign jurisdictions.
A book signing with Iconoclast Books will follow. This program will be livestreamed and available to view later on Vimeo. Click here to watch online.
The Boy, the War, and the Big Two-Hearted River
with John Maclean
Hemingway Writer-In-Residence John Maclean will share and discuss a new piece he’s writing for a book of essays celebrating the centennial of Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “Big Two-Hearted River.” The collection will be published in 2023—the centennial of the first notes for the short story-—by the University Press of Kentucky.
Maclean’s personal essay traces the importance of the Hemingway short story in the lives and writing of John and his late father Norman Maclean, but it also surveys the publishing and critical history of the story. Join us as John shares this new essay and invites your questions and feedback on this soon-to-be-published piece.
This event will be livestreamed and available to view later. Click here to watch online. A book signing with Chapter One will follow.
John Maclean is an award-winning author and journalist. He spent thirty year at the Chicago Tribune, most of that time as a Washington correspondent. He is the author of six books, most recently Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River. He has also written five nonfiction books about wildland fires—Fire on the Mountain, Fire and Ashes, The Thirtymile Fire, The Esperanza Fire, and River of Fire—that are considered a staple of fire literature as well as training material for firefighters. An avid fly-fisherman, Maclean divides his time between his residence in Washington, D.C. and the Maclean family cabin in Montana.
Book Review: The Library Book
Andrea Nelson, Library Assistant, recommends The Library Book by Susan Orlean.
Ahh, Los Angeles in the eighties! Such a study in contrasts. At once glittering, decaying, innovative, desperate, brilliant and dark. Shining stars, black holes, and all manner of people. In the twentieth century, dreamers from every corner of the planet flocked to L.A. By the mid-eighties, the City of Angels was both a cultural mecca and its own stylized cliché, but at its heart stood one true thing, steadfast and dependable: a wonderful public library. The Los Angeles Central Public Library was not just any library, mind you. It supplied the entire sprawling metropolis with books. Its complicated transportation network ensured that a steady stream of knowledge and literacy would flow in and out of the many satellite libraries that popped up to enrich its ever-expanding suburbs and boroughs.
Once considered an architectural masterpiece, time had not been kind to the Central Library. It needed costly renovation, expansion and safety upgrades. As always, such things were expensive, and the City Council had many budgetary demands. The fabled landmark that boasted some of the largest and most important collections in the Western United States began to decay. One day in 1986, a charismatic storyteller and aspiring actor with a memorable mop of bright blonde hair may– or may not– have visited the library. On that day, a fire started.
On that terrible day, countless stories were forever erased from recorded history.
Over the next seven days, firefighters battled the worst library fire in American history. Once the flames took hold in the stacks, the fire quickly grew. Unchecked, it tore through the old shelves, staircases, and airducts. Pages glowed, curled and crumbled, reducing irreplaceable collections to ash. Sticky, black smoke decimated print stock. At one point, the temperature inside the library reached two thousand degrees, blowing out windows, melting book covers, and snapping spines. Some charred pages survived, floating down to the streets below, into the hands of crying patrons and traumatized librarians. Ironically, the very swords that killed the beast—the firefighter’s hoses—caused the most damage to the library’s precious contents. In the end, more than a million books, maps, transcripts, films, and other unique items were lost. Many artifacts were one of a kind—many books long out of print. On that terrible day, countless stories were forever erased from recorded history.
Although the fire of 1986 remains an important page in Los Angeles history, the tragedy never made headlines, because a more pressing event dominated the news cycles that week. A nuclear meltdown at a major Russian plant in Chernobyl threatened to send a deadly cloud of radiation across Eastern Europe, becoming the humanitarian disaster of the decade.
In 2018, brilliant researcher and award-winning journalist Susan Orlean finally gave the library fire it’s proper place in history. The Library Book tells the captivating story of the Los Angeles Central Public Library through time, illuminating it’s fascinating origin and quirky, colorful staff through the ages. In true Orlean style, the fire is only the splash at the center of many rippling rings, from the bizarre statements of the sole arson suspect, Harry Peak, to the mesmerizing behavior of the fire, to the complex and multifaceted character of the city itself.
Orlean has a gift for turning years of painstaking research into a riveting read. Of her many books, The Library Book is her Opus. Chances are, if you’ve read this blog to the end, you share my love of libraries. This one’s for you.
