Library Blog

Book Review: Beautiful World, Where are You

February 26, 2025 by kmerwin

Director of Regional History Mary Tyson recommends Beautiful World, Where are You by Sally Rooney.

Mary Tyson Beautiful World Where Are You

Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You found me, not as a holiday gift, but with its intriguing cover on display at the end of a Library aisle. This is a character-driven novel, so if you’re looking for dramatic action, you won’t find it here.

Instead, you’ll get to know the intimate relationships between three long-time childhood friends: Alice, Eileen, and Simon, now in their twenties and thirties, and the addition of a fourth, new friend, Felix. The story is told through their dialogue, texts, and emails, along with simple evocative descriptions of their environments, revealing the tender love that exists or is growing anew. Alice, a successful novelist, meets Felix, a coarse-mannered warehouse worker through a dating app. Eileen and Simon are off and on friends and lovers.

Set in contemporary Dublin, the story is told through a backdrop of concerns around climate change and all the political problems that seem unending. Other cultural norms are bisexuality is an easy given. There is fluidity to navigating flirtation, casual sex, and friendship.

Worry about the world coming to an end influences the characters’ commitment to living a life that they want or think they can have. This is a quiet novel with a lot of tenderness and piercing inner conflicts brewing. The characters could be described as lost, though for me, their questions and dilemmas feel very human and, frankly, expected.

The strength of the book lies in each of the characters’ relatability and convincing reality. The author creates the right disposition between human flaws and virtues, neither dominating. As Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon change and intertwine, they tussle with the contradictions of a decline of civilization and the hope for a future they could still affect. If you don’t mind a slow-paced non-action read – with smart characters – I highly recommend this book.

Find it in our collection in print, ebook, eaudiobook, and on CD here.

Loops and Bounds

February 21, 2025 by kmerwin

The Invitation of Ink

By Martha Williams
Director of Programs and Education

Liaison Yidan Guo and Martha banner — *L-R: Martha Williams, Artist Yidan Guo, Guo and Paul Bates at the installation* *of the Memorial Banners in the Library’s Lecture Hall*

Above my head flutter loops of translucent paper, inked Chinese characters dancing down the lecture hall’s beams. These Memorial Banners tell of the more than 10,000 Chinese workers who contributed to building the western section of the Transcontinental Railroad between 1863 and 1869.

Paid less than their white counterparts, segregated and discriminated against, these laborers enduring blustering winters in the Sierra Nevada – as well as rockslides and explosions and other violences – far from the homes they sent money to and longed for.

Artist Yidan Guo created the two 65-foot banners in honor of these workers, whose names are mostly lost to us now.

Their voices disappeared as letters home were destroyed, and their faces were omitted from the final flash of a photograph at Promontory Summit when the Golden Spike was driven in.

Their story, drawing from historical texts, begins at one end of the light brown paper, commonly used in traditional Chinese art. Their tale continues onto red, a shade used during the Chinese New Year when scrolls of poetry adorn doorways welcoming guests and inviting prosperity and peace.

The artist was creating the work in early 2024 in her Pocatello studio around the time of the holiday. “Out of nostalgia, I chose this red paper to pray for my homeland,” she says.

“Additionally, I attributed the meanings of ‘passion’ and ‘blood’ to this color, to commemorate those Chinese workers who sacrificed their lives in the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad.”

Standing under these banners I notice how the Chinese characters bleed through the thin paper and can be seen from all angles, the story layering over on itself and becoming part of the room. It’s a narrative I cannot read, one that eludes me. But it’s a story and a labor I can appreciate: Guo’s desire to commemorate the men who left their war-torn homelands seeking ways to support their families.

Gazing at these characters, unintelligible to me as a whole but mesmerizing as I spend a few moments looking at each one – the ink evoking a visual story of fire (火) and mountains (山) and men (男) – I see a story within each brushstroke. I’m reminded of the young woman Daiyu, the central character of Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s novel Four Treasures of the Sky (our 2025 Winter Read) who learns calligraphy before being kidnapped from her home in China and arriving in San Francisco and then a mining town in 1880s Idaho.

Navigating new and bewildering people and places, Daiyu conjures up images of Chinese characters to help her make sense of this new world. Calligraphy is for her a tether to home, a view into the life she could have led. And, as she learns from Master Wang, calligraphy is not only a practice, but a philosophy: “something to be carried for the rest of the calligrapher’s life, the ink replacing blood, the brush replacing arms.”

This is the kind of person you can become, he tells his students, “The kind who approaches the world as a blank sheet of paper every time.”

What more are the stories we read, the thousands of books on the shelves here at The Community Library, than blank sheets of paper full of the life and blood others have poured onto them? Stories of survival and failure and joy and hardship. Stories of leaving behind one home and finding another, of leaving behind one version of the self and evolving into something unexpected.

Reading is our opportunity to hear about the lives of others, to interpret their experiences and compare them with our own. To be entertained, to learn, to engage with the wide world beyond our door. To open our minds to the many voices and histories these inks convey…

…to be blank pages receiving and creating our own new stories every day.

I hope you’ll join us on Monday, February 24 for “Mastering the Brush,” a conversation with Yidan Guo, who will tell us about the process of creating these banners and about the role of calligraphy in her art. A few days later, on Thursday, February 27, we’ll close out the Winter Read with a talk from author Jenny Tinghui Zhang.

Come join us, as we talk together about these loops and bound stacks of paper, and about how magical and inviting a simple piece of paper and a bottle of ink can be.

Idaho Public Television filmed a short documentary, Defying Expectations: Yidan Guo, posted on Instagram.

The Challenger Inn

February 14, 2025 by Liam Guthrie

Kristine Bretall, Wood River Museum Community Engagement Manager

Two kids ski towards the Challenger Inn — Challenger Inn, 1955. Union Pacific Photo Collection. Photo courtesy of the Jeanne Rodger Lane Center for Regional History

Here, we look back on an old image of kids on skis approaching the Challenger Inn from the pond near the Sun Valley Opera House in about 1955. The shot was taken for publicity purposes by the Union Pacific Railroad, which owned Sun Valley Resort at the time.

From the start of the resort in December 1936, Union Pacific’s goal was to get travelers to arrive by train and stay at the resort for all their needs. The Sun Valley Lodge opened that first winter of 1936-37, but quickly saw a need for a more affordable place for people to stay with their families in tow. The Challenger Inn was designed to resemble a Tyrolean village, with the building painted a variety of colors to look like individual buildings.

For the resort’s second winter, the Inn opened in 1937 and rooms were $4 per person per night—with up to four per room. Meanwhile, in the Lodge, a suite with en suite bathrooms and a deck cost $36-$48 per night. In addition to being much more affordable, the Challenger also featured a bowling alley, a 500-seat movie theater, an outdoor pool, a game room with billiards and slot machines, the Ram Restaurant and even a drug store and general store.

The Inn quickly became the hub of fun and activity at the resort and many a guest chose the livelier Inn over the high-society atmosphere in the Lodge. The Challenger Inn was later rebranded as the Sun Valley Inn to ensure that the Sun Valley name wasn’t used on a hotel elsewhere and cause confusion.

The Community Library’s Center for Regional History has a trove of incredible photos. The Union Pacific Photo Collection was saved from a landfill in Omaha, Nebraska, by librarian Dottie Thomas in 1982. She happened to be there when Union Pacific was clearing out its “photo morgue.” Lucky for all of us.

Note this story was originally published in February of 2025 in the Idaho Mountain Express.

Book Review: A Walk in the Woods

February 12, 2025 by kmerwin

Gold Mine Processing Associate Peter Matschek recommends A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson.

In short, this book is about the Appalachian Trail. As a backpacker in my youth, I was interested in the long hiking trails in the country such as the Pacific Crest Trail and the Appalachian Trail, but I didn’t know much about the AT (as it is known by). The author had lived the previous 20 years in England and when he returned to New England, he decided to hike the trail.

He didn’t let his lack of experience get in the way of doing this trip.

He started out by researching the history and discovering that it might not the cakewalk he had envisioned. “Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving an acquaintance who came stumbling back two days later with a bobcat attached to his head or dripping blood from an armless sleeve and whispering in a hoarse voice Bear! Bryson goes on to list a variety of wildlife that inhabits the woods:

“… rattlesnakes and water moccasins and nests of copperheads, bobcats, bears coyotes, wolves … looney hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex.”

Bryson lists the diseases one can develop while in the woods with Lyme disease being “for the person who wants to experience it all.” He also mentions the killings that have occurred on the trail and people who come up missing without a trace.

You would think that all this information would discourage him from actually hiking the AT, but no, he was bound and determined. He asked a friend to join him who was even more clueless about what they were getting into (not to mention “gloriously out of shape”). They wound up hiking over 800 miles of the trail in different sections and met “a bizarre assortment of hilarious characters.”

Bryson also describes the history of the AT and all the areas that the trail traverses. It’s a very entertaining and informative book and I recommend it to anybody who is interested in the Appalachian Trail.

Find it in our collection in print, large print, ebook, CD, and DVD here.

Book Review: Four Treasures of the Sky

February 11, 2025 by kmerwin

Director of Programs and Education Martha Williams recommends Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang.

Zhang’s beautifully written historical novel begins in 1880s China, where a thirteen-year-old girl named Daiyu’s life is turned upside down by circumstances beyond her control. Her loving parents are mysteriously arrested, her grandmother instructs her to dress as a boy and disappear in the crowded city of Zhifu, and she begins making her own way, completely unprepared for what lies ahead.

In Zhifu, Daiyu begins building a new life as a boy named Feng who cleans a calligraphy school for room and board. Daiyu secretly studies the enchanting characters, and Master Wang notices her hunger for learning. He takes on this new pupil, imparting that…

…calligraphy is “not only about the methods of writing but also cultivating one’s character.”

Daiyu’s time at the school is brief and illuminating. Then one day at the fish market, Daiyu is tricked, kidnapped, and trafficked to the United States by brutal means. She alights in San Francisco, where she is sold to a Chinatown brothel. Daiyu will ultimately escape this entrapment and run away to Idaho. There she will find both new freedoms and new terrors in the mining town of Pierce, while continuing to present herself as a boy, now named Jacob and working in a grocery run by two kind Chinese men.

Daiyu’s saga is heartbreaking. She will endure what many Chinese immigrants to the U.S. in the late 19^th century experienced: both invisibility and visible hatred. She is in danger many times throughout the book because of her gender or her nationality, seen by some as a threat to American workers and prosperity. And all Daiyu wants is to return home, to find her family, and to reclaim the safety she once knew.

As she encounters new geographies, caring friends, and those who choose to be foes, Daiyu carries with her the mythology of her name and the calligraphy practice learned from Master Wang. She keeps searching for her own way in an unkind world and for ways to understand the bewildering and sometimes frightening circumstances she finds herself in.

Inspired by a real 1885 event in Pierce, Idaho, Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s masterful novel makes real and vivid the discrimination Chinese people faced leading up to and in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act…

…and the longstanding effects of this law on the landscape of the American West: the violence Chinese people faced from neighbors and once friends, their absence in present-day communities, and the erasure of their contributions to this place.

We selected Four Treasures of the Skys our annual Winter Read, a community-wide read in partnership with valley libraries, to bring attention to this history—our shared history that affects how we live today and offers to inform how we act in the present. More about Winter Read 2025 here.

Join us for Winter Read events throughout the month of February, from speakers to exhibits to book discussions. Zhang will join us for the closing keynote, here at The Community Library on Thursday, February 27, 2025.

Find Four Treasures of the Sky in all formats at The Community Library here.

Book Review: The Mighty Red

February 3, 2025 by kmerwin

Information Systems Manager Will Duke recommends The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich.

One of the many things I enjoy about the Erdrich universe is the way she shifts between characters from book to book, each presenting unique and often opposing points of view. For the past few decades, she has bounced around the communities of Argus, Pluto, and Hoopdance, generally with the Turtle Mountain Reservation as a backdrop. Her novels explore these towns through the eyes of different inhabitants. The often-opposing perspectives of the characters are a delight for attentive readers.

It’s world creation on a grand scale.

In The Mighty Red, Erdrich takes us to a new fictional town, Tabor, in the Red River Valley. This time, she doesn’t make us wait for the next novel to give us these different perspectives. Whether it’s the daughter, the mother, the father, the boyfriend, the other boyfriend, the mother-in-law, or the friend – who plays a dual role as both her friend and her boyfriend’s friend – these characters have a lot to say and do. While Erdrich turns these characters loose on each other, literally, she uses each one to build the community of the novel.

She gets each of them to divulge a piece of the hidden event, because it’s a small town, and everybody knows everyone else’s business.

As the plot unfolds, so too does the complexity of the characters’ – and humanity’s – relationship with the land itself. These characters wrestle with the financial and health realities of farming, but Erdrich also brings in the wildlife around them, and the very dirt under their feet. This is no utopian or dystopian view of farming. Erdrich presents a nuanced, multifaceted exploration of its realities.

And as if that weren’t enough, this all happens in the midst of the 2008 financial meltdown.

Now, I’m not going to reveal the event at the center of the story – that’s the highest of crimes in my book – but I will say you might want to plan for a second pass through this novel. There are a lot of characters, relationships, and philosophies. And a lot of plot. A second read will treat the reader to all the subtle hints that were there all along, but also the sheer joy of reading Louise’s prose. Yes, I’m going to use her first name. With an author of this caliber, you just know them by the way they write, and Louise clearly wants to be on a first name basis with her readers – or at least, that’s how it feels to me.

The overall effect is a wonderful mosaic of the complex interconnectedness of a small-town community. Looking back, I feel like I’m seeing the town and its denizens through a stained-glass window.

I have been reading Louise Erdrich since college. I will never be able to thank her enough for the amusement – and wisdom? – old Nanapush has given me. Nanapush doesn’t show up this time, but I always feel like he’s hiding in each shadow and behind every rock.

Finally, every time I talk about Louise, everyone in the room wrestles with how to pronounce her name. I recently watched an interview where Louise explained it herself. Her name comes from her German father and is pronounced Ur-drik. You’re welcome.

Note: Will Duke will be leading a discussion of The Mighty Red for the Library’s Book Club on Wednesday, April 2, 2025, at 5:30 p.m. in the Programs Studio. More/register here.